Ringed Saturn Visible All Night

Notrump

Muse
Notrump
Joined
Oct 20, 2005
Messages
807
Location
USA
Saturn and its rings are approaching opposition from the Sun on May 10th when the fairly bright planet will be out all night. Greatest brilliance is expected a little earlier around May 5th. My detailed article and graphics related to this year’s apparition can be found at: http://www.CurtRenz.com/saturn

Photos and descriptions of Saturn and its rings would be welcome additions to this thread.
 
Notrump said:
Saturn and its rings are approaching opposition from the Sun on May 10th when the fairly bright planet will be out all night. Greatest brilliance is expected a little earlier around May 5th. My detailed article and graphics related to this year’s apparition can be found at: http://www.CurtRenz.com/saturn

Photos and descriptions of Saturn and its rings would be welcome additions to this thread.
Click to expand...

Cool, I took a shot at making a movie of the eclipse. It turns out that starting to learn how to use some of the settings on my camera that I have never used before just as the eclipse was starting wasn't a good plan, but I did get quite a few pictures of a very red moon. I didn't expect it to be so red and I didn't expect it to stay eclipsed for so long.

My camera has a twenty to one zoom*. I've never succeed in getting a picture of Jupiter's moons or Saturn's rings but I think it should be capable of doing that and I'm going to give it a shot.

* actually only about 15 times normal, the 20 to 1 refers to the entire range of the zoom from wide angle to full telephoto.
 
Thanks for the heads-up as always, Notrump!

davefoc said:
Cool, I took a shot at making a movie of the eclipse. It turns out that starting to learn how to use some of the settings on my camera that I have never used before just as the eclipse was starting wasn't a good plan, but I did get quite a few pictures of a very red moon. I didn't expect it to be so red and I didn't expect it to stay eclipsed for so long.

My camera has a twenty to one zoom*. I've never succeed in getting a picture of Jupiter's moons or Saturn's rings but I think it should be capable of doing that and I'm going to give it a shot.

* actually only about 15 times normal, the 20 to 1 refers to the entire range of the zoom from wide angle to full telephoto.
Click to expand...

Post'em up, please!
I mean, the red moon photos.
 
davefoc said:
My camera has a twenty to one zoom*. I've never succeed in getting a picture of Jupiter's moons or Saturn's rings but I think it should be capable of doing that and I'm going to give it a shot.
Click to expand...
I'm no expert but, unfortunately, I honestly don't see you getting a shot of Jupiter or Saturn with a standard camera with ANY type of zoom lens - it simply won't capture enough light fast enough before the image blurs through the Earth's movement.

I have a 200mm diameter f6.0 Dodsonian telescope and I can't see anything much smaller resolving sufficiently well to photograph planets.

Could be wrong, though. :)
 
Southwind17 said:
I'm no expert but, unfortunately, I honestly don't see you getting a shot of Jupiter or Saturn with a standard camera with ANY type of zoom lens - it simply won't capture enough light fast enough before the image blurs through the Earth's movement.

I have a 200mm diameter f6.0 Dodsonian telescope and I can't see anything much smaller resolving sufficiently well to photograph planets.

Could be wrong, though. :)
Click to expand...

I think you might be right. I've tried to see the rings and moons with binoculars without success and I've tried to take pictures of the rings and moons with this camera without success, but I'm up for one more try.

Maybe something I learned from taking the pictures of the eclipse will help. And speaking of the eclipse this is a collection of some of the pictures I took. I had no idea lunar eclipses lasted this long and I eventually got bored and went inside and came out just about in time to catch the end of the eclipse.

https://plus.google.com/photos/1093...6009074048076810610&oid=109328117361721097794

The biggest surprise was how red the moon got.
 
davefoc said:
I think you might be right. I've tried to see the rings and moons with binoculars without success and I've tried to take pictures of the rings and moons with this camera without success, but I'm up for one more try.

Maybe something I learned from taking the pictures of the eclipse will help. And speaking of the eclipse this is a collection of some of the pictures I took. I had no idea lunar eclipses lasted this long and I eventually got bored and went inside and came out just about in time to catch the end of the eclipse.

https://plus.google.com/photos/1093...6009074048076810610&oid=109328117361721097794

The biggest surprise was how red the moon got.
Click to expand...
Nice photos!

The thing with a camera is you'll pretty much capture what you actually see, so if you can't actually see Saturn through the viewfinder, for example, then you won't photograph it (unless you're doing long exposures, but then you'll need a digital tracking mount, and I'm not sure whether those are sufficiently 'smooth' for photography).

Just for context, Saturn passes across the entire field of view of my telescope within 2-3 minutes at a level of magnification appropriate to capture a meaningful photo. Not sure what the best way to try to photograph under those circumstances would be.
 
Southwind17 said:
I'm no expert but, unfortunately, I honestly don't see you getting a shot of Jupiter or Saturn with a standard camera with ANY type of zoom lens - it simply won't capture enough light fast enough before the image blurs through the Earth's movement.

I have a 200mm diameter f6.0 Dodsonian telescope and I can't see anything much smaller resolving sufficiently well to photograph planets.

Could be wrong, though. :)
Click to expand...

It might work if you put it on a tracking tripod mount.
 
Planetary imaging typically needs short exposures. Tracking isn't the big issue usually. Getting high magnification is.
 
edd said:
Planetary imaging typically needs short exposures. Tracking isn't the big issue usually. Getting high magnification is.
Click to expand...

Right.

The near planets have plenty of illumination. You can get a picture of Saturn with a good telephoto. Say a decent 400mm on a 35mm SLR using ISO 400, F5.6, 1/100 sec. on a regular tripod. No need for tracking. You can get an image of the rings but fuzzy detail. Most of the detail is limited by lens quality and diffraction limits. If you have the money a 600mm will do a better job but will cost well into 4 figures.
 
edd said:
Planetary imaging typically needs short exposures. Tracking isn't the big issue usually. Getting high magnification is.
Click to expand...
Not strictly true. Magnification is one thing but you need to capture enough light first. That can only be done with a large objective, which conventional cameras don't have. You can go buy a cheap 50mm 200x telescope but don't be disappointed when you point it at a planet and all you see is a faint spot of light. Forget Saturn's 'rings'.
 
marting said:
The near planets have plenty of illumination. You can get a picture of Saturn with a good telephoto. Say a decent 400mm on a 35mm SLR using ISO 400, F5.6, 1/100 sec. on a regular tripod. No need for tracking.
Click to expand...
Are you able to post an example?
 
Southwind17 said:
Are you able to post an example?
Click to expand...

This is more or less the experiment I'm going to try.

Tripod
push up the ISO
manual focus to infinity
biggest aperture at max optical zoom
1 second exposure (longest on my camera)

My guess right now is that magnification is going to be the problem. How many pixels are Jupiter's moons under those conditions? Maybe the rings will be a different problem. They're pretty big, but I'm going to need to have enough contrast between the planet and the rings to see them. It might help if I went to an area with less light pollution and clearer skies.

Of course, I only expect at best a crap photo. But I'd just like to see if I can achieve even a crap photo that will show either Jupiter's moons or Saturn's rings with my camera.
 
This is my photo of Saturn:

saturn.jpg


Taken with my Iphone through my Telescope.
 
Southwind17 said:
Not strictly true. Magnification is one thing but you need to capture enough light first. That can only be done with a large objective, which conventional cameras don't have. You can go buy a cheap 50mm 200x telescope but don't be disappointed when you point it at a planet and all you see is a faint spot of light. Forget Saturn's 'rings'.
Click to expand...

Certainly it's a little more complex than I suggested but if you're talking about getting anything with an ordinary camera lens then the exposure time isn't an issue. Once you do have something capable of giving at least some signal at high magnification you still want multiple short exposures to stack rather than a single long exposure.
 
Jupiter seems to have moons:

https://plus.google.com/photos/1093...6009836550937480130&oid=109328117361721097794

At first I wasn't sure if I was looking at a photo artifact or the two dots to the left and up from Jupiter were moons. Looking around the web it seems like they probably are moons. The biggest improvement to getting the images came when I switched to the delayed shutter release. I thought the vibrations from pushing the button would die out fast enough that they wouldn't affect an image taken with a one second exposure. That was not the case.

If you click to the second image you can see a picture of the moon and Jupiter above my street taken with the camera zoomed out.

I experimented with lowering the exposure such that Jupiter wasn't so over exposed but then the moons faded almost to invisible. Now I wonder what I might have seen on Jupiter itself if I had dropped the exposure a bit more. Any chance that I could have seen the red spot?
 
davefoc said:
Jupiter seems to have moons:
Click to expand...

Jupiter has 61 known moons and is 318 times more massive than earth.

The best way to get a good image of Jupiter is to use a video camera with a telescope and stacking individual video images.
 
Shalamar said:
This is my photo of Saturn:

[qimg]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-J68gNJrqXNU/UdBrMkD_9II/AAAAAAAAwsg/jkALqpr1SL8/s800/saturn.jpg[/qimg]

Taken with my Iphone through my Telescope.
Click to expand...
What's you telescope spec? Did you mount the iPhone or just hand hold it against the eyepiece?
 
Southwind17 said:
What's you telescope spec? Did you mount the iPhone or just hand hold it against the eyepiece?
Click to expand...

It's an AstroTech 80ED. Nothing special. And yes. I carefully held the iphone up against the eyepiece.

I've done some Prime Focus Astrophotography, but it doesn't work well for me and planets, yet.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom