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Planetary Photos

Planets

The bright planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – are favourite targets for amateur astronomers. Constantly changing as they orbit the sun – or even hour to hour in some cases – they’re always something to look at.

So far I haven’t had much chance to do planetary observing. He’s the first I’ve done that I’m really pleased with – Saturn.

		This was the result of stacking approximately 500 x 0.2 second frames with the EvoStar 100ED Pro. I used a 2x barlow to make the image as big as possible. The planet was low in the sky, so conditions were poor. It’s a nice enough image, but doesn’t show much detail.
		This is the same image after processing. I used the wavelets function in Registax, adjusted colour levels, brughtness and contrast in Photoshop, then applied a light unsharp mask. It’s amazing the amount of detail which is hidden in the image if you spend a little time bringing it out. You can clearly make out one or two cloud belts, the Cassini division in the rings, andthe shadow of the planet on the ring plane.
		A better image of Saturn using the same setup – this time about 800 frames.
		Saturn (19 March 2007) – 2 stacks of 3000 and 750 frames with the finals composited. Unfortunately, the image is a little out of focus; worse, there is obvious ‘screening’ across the video which I suspect is due to the webcam heating up. Must try again with the modified webcam and the amp switched off.
		Here is a not-very-impressive image of Venus obtained using the same method and equipment as above. It was taken in daylight (and photoshopped). Mar 3 2007. There is no detail visible, but you can just see that it’s not 100% circular. As Venus orbits the sun, it shows phases like the moon. Here it is approx 87% full.
		Another daylight image of Venus, this time 26 Mar. You can clearly see the phase and there is a suggestion of detai. It is to scale with the previous image – it’s a little larger, and the phase is now 81% Green+IR block filters, ~200 frames, 4x barlow.
		Mars, 2007 Dec 10.
		A montage of some shots of Venus during the 2007 apparition. All images were taken in daylight. You can clearly see the growth of the planet and the percentage phase decreasing.