Deriino on DeviantArthttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/https://www.deviantart.com/deriino/art/Making-the-most-out-of-a-low-quality-telescope-429571811Deriino

Deviation Actions

Making the most out of a low-quality telescope

Deriino

Published: Jan 26, 2014

875 Views

Description

For the past few days, I've been messing around a lot with my 4" Bushnell 783612; for its size, it seems powerful at first...until you realize that it's a reflecting scope with no way of changing the zoom. I only remember seeing three planets directly with this thing. Attempting to see Saturn's rings strains the eyes severely. The same goes for the spiral bands on Jupiter (though the moons, as even smaller points of light, seem fine). Lastly, Uranus (uu-rah-nos) appears as a dot hardly bigger than Ganymede, though this is more excusable, since Uranus is the second dimmest planet in the solar system anyways.

Last night, I decided to take a shot at photography of the planet Jupiter. Needless to say, the battle of positioning and adjusting my camera just right was much more extreme than actually aiming the telescope at the planet. Trying to get the camera steady was an ungodly nightmare; after about fifty or sixty blurry as s*** photos of a large blurry ugly blob being stalked by three smaller blurry ugly blobs (Callisto was usually out of the frame), my frustration compelled me to just videotape the imagery for several minutes. Only one in about a kajillion frames were clear enough for someone to decipher Jupiter's spiral bands.

This image is the result of my conglomerating the best two frames together, modifying the brightness curves to give higher contrast of the bands, and doctoring the hues so that Jupiter doesn't look unrealistically blue. Compared to a recent and much more detailed pic of Jupiter ( i.imgur.com/MUAfK7V.jpg ), I think this result turned out pretty accurate.