Post your Jupiter (planet) shots here...

Spotmatic · Joined: 18 Aug 2008 Posts: 4045 Location: Netherlands

Jupiter is very close at the moment; so I had some fun trying to capture it with my old 6MP Pentax *ist DS (my 14MP Pentax K-7 was sold in anticipation of the 16MP Pentax K-5) and Sigma 500/4.5 APO EX with the matching 1.4x APO teleconverter attached. It was fun; I have never taken a photo of a planet before.

In both cases I cropped Jupiter to a pixel level and enlarged the resulting picture 2x in Photoshop.

First a correctly exposed Jupiter. You can tell that it's Jupiter by the (barely visible) cloud bands.

ISO 200, 1/100s, F8

An overexposed Jupiter with its moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto (not necessarily in that order) visible:

ISO 200, 1/4s, F5.6

Now please post yours! Get all your long glass and teleconverters out and show us the results! You cannot miss Jupiter; it's the brightest "star" in the Northern hemisphere where it's visible in the south-east.

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas

I'll have a look tonight. I have a couple of old manual aperture teles -- a 500mm and a 650mm -- that might show some results. No 1.4x for my EOS, though, just a 2x, but it's a good one.

Last time I looked at Jupiter, it was through a Meade LX3 I used to own -- a 10" f/8, which translates into a 2032mm f/8 optic. And even with that light bucket and a fairly high-powered eyepiece, the bands were barely visible. So, I'd say you did a decent job with that first photo.

Care to share your exposure info (including ISO) with us for the two shots you posted?

Spotmatic · Joined: 18 Aug 2008 Posts: 4045 Location: Netherlands

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas

Okay, I pulled out my long tele and decided to give Jupiter a try tonight. Next time I try astrophotography, I'm gonna rig up a chair or a stool or something to sit in, cuz it totally killed my back having to bend around into crazy positions to view the subject. And live view wasn't much of a help, either.

The sky here in Houston was very clear tonight, and I was able to get a couple of good captures of Jupiter out of about a dozen images. When I called up the better of the two and zoomed in, I noticed just a bit of a glimmer of two of the moons, and I thought, hey, I wonder if they can be brought out? So, I asked my daughter, who's a real whiz at Photoshop, if she could bring out the four moons without changing anything else in the image. It was a piece of cake to her. Took her maybe a couple minutes. I suppose if I were being more of a purist, I would have told her to dial down the brightness on the outer moon some, since it's the dimmest of the four, but I was just glad she could do it, and wasn't gonna push things.

So, all I did was adjust the hue and saturation some and then upsized the image by about 90%. It took the upsizing pretty well, I think. The following is a 100% crop of the upsized image.

Canon EOS XS with Century Precision Optics Tele-Athenar II 650mm f/6.8, 2x Vivitar Macro TC, 1/200 second @ f/6.8, ISO 400.

Spotmatic · Joined: 18 Aug 2008 Posts: 4045 Location: Netherlands

Michael, that shot is just plain great! Apparently the Tele-Athenar is a great lens for astrophotography. I will try again in the coming days (hopefully with a new camera).

I feel sorry for your back though (because I'm a bit responsible for it) Sad

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas