Galileo's Camera

Merge of multiple frames - Saturn (L) and Jupiter (R) on 25th December 2020. The angular separation is about 25'. Shot with a Canon 450D on a Nexstar 6SE. Equipment courtesy of Eranga Ganegala, The year of 2020 was not a great year in many ways. But it was not without its own silver lines. Back in July 2020, we saw the brightest comet in 23 years, the Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) and further before in June, some parts of the world were able to witness an annular solar eclipse. On December 14th, people in Chile and Argentina were able to view a total solar eclipse, which would be the last total solar eclipse till 2024. The best of the events however, is probably the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. A conjunction is when two or more astronomical bodies get very close to each other from a visible point of view. Given that the stars are in a fixed position (unless you observe for over a period of say, ten to hundred thousand years), this refers to objects that are moving across ...

The Saturn opposition took place on 3rd June 2016 and was incidentally having a close approach with Earth. Tried my luck a few days after and it didn't turn up too bad. Saturn - 6th June 2016. 4SE and Canon 550D with 2x Barlow (Samyang). A stack of 150 frames on 640x480 crop mode. An opposition does not always mean that the planet is closest to Earth. However in this case it seems to have been so. I probably need to touch up that image a lot more and probably would end up with a clear demarcation of the Cassini Divide. But for now, this'd have to do :)

I was going to wait till I get a good shot of Mercury before I posted this. But it is unlikely that I would be able to do stargazing in the next few weeks, so decided to put up what I managed to capture yesterday and today. Venus - 25th Jan 2014 Mars - 26th Jan 2014 Jupiter - 26th Jan 2014 Saturn - 26th Jan 2014 All the images were taken using Canon 550D's Movie Crop mode, exporting the file as a avi in Canon ZoomBrowser and then stacking them all on Registax. I guess I still have a lot to learn about wavelet processing! All the images above are comparable in their apparent sizes except for Venus. Venus looks like 50% of the width and height pictured above (yes even then, Venus looks larger than Jupiter because it is very close to Earth these days). I am quite ecstatic about the whole shoot because I managed to capture all the planets barring Mercury and to a reasonable detail. I didn't expect the GRS on Jupiter or the Cassini Divide on Saturn or the featu...

Probably about an year or so back, I tried to capture Saturn. It didn't work out well because there was a collimation error in the telescope; Saturn turned out like two saucers placed face to face. Last week, when I visited a national park, I decided to try it once more, this time with the Samyang 500mm Mirror Lens. This also being around the time of the Saturn opposition (Saturn being on the opposite side of the Sun and being closest to Earth), I thought it would make a good target. Only two problems: Cloud cover and the Full Moon. Anyway, I did manage to capture a reasonably okish amateur shot of Saturn. I just wish I had my telescope with me. Saturn - Samyang Mirror Lens, Canon 550D with 800 ISO 1/50 shutter speed. I did try to take another shot with the 2x converter attached to the mirror lens, but it seems like the vibration of the shutter is too much for the whole apparatus. The photos taken with the converter turned out to be just elongated bright blobs of light. ...