Astrophotos March 2012

After the success of the taking Mars with the x2 barlow I thought I'd try it on other planets. All these photos were taken on the same evening, 24 March in the New Forest.

Here's Mars again. This time it's clearer and you can see one of the poles, which is that white spot at the top. 

Mars

Jupiter with the barlow looks really big but I think the detail is starting to suffer.  Still looks impressive though.

Jupiter

 

Venus and Jupiter was very close in the sky this month. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take a photo of them together but I did manage a close up of Venus.

Here is the moon a couple of days old. It was very close to the horizon. Because the webcam views such a tiny part of the sky I had to take five photos of the moon and stitch them together to make this large image. Click on it to enlarge.

Astrophotos February 2012

All these photos were taken on one evening, the 19 February. I'm starting to get better at using the equipment and I'm able to take longer shots. I think the main benefit comes from the new software I'm using to take the video and I'm no longer using a virtual machine but a Windows partition (my laptop is a MacBook but the webcam and software is Windows only).

Anyway, enough of this techno-babal here are the photos.

At the time of taking the photos Venus was really bright and you could see it for most of the night. Jupiter was right over head approaching Venus. Mars was making its appearance a lot later on in the evening.

Venus in half phase looking very beautiful. I'm not sure if I've got the brightness correct yet. I know that you can't see any surface detail due to the full coverage of the highly toxic cloud system.

Venus

 
Jupiter, looking different from the shots I've previously taken. This is one of my favourites of Jupiter because you can see a lot of detail. Notice the different angle of the bands compared to previous photos. There also seems to be a tinged of blue and I'm not sure what that is.

Jupiter

This is Mars, the red planet. You really can see the surface detail. You can also that blueish light again! This was taken with the webcam connected to the x2 barlow.

Mars

Astrophotos October 2011

I can't believe there is a 6 month gap between buying the webcam and actually taking photos with it but anyway here goes.
 
These are the first shots taken with the webcam. When I first saw them on the laptop I was completely stunned at how close and large Jupiter appeared. I'm not using any eye pieces or filters. To see these images through the ETX with your eye I'd need to use an eye piece more powerful than I actually have.

Jupiter and which looks like the Great Red Spot

Jupiter again but a few minutes later. Notice that the Great Red Spot has moved around due to the planets rotation.

Later in the month I took these shots of the moon. Looking a bit too green.