The Planets Of The Solar System

A few years ago, I was very active in the field of amateur astronomy. I used to take pictures of the planets and the moon using a MEADE ETX 105 telescope and a Philips TouCam Pro webcam. I have not been very involved with astronomy lately (I hope that will change in the next few years when I can finally move to a house with a backyard), but I thought I’d share a few of those pictures with my readers. The picture below features Mars (taken at three different times of the year - notice the ice cap progressively melting), Jupiter and Saturn. Also check out this time-lapse movie of Jupiter [200KB] showing the famous great red spot. Enjoy!

Mars, Jupiter and Saturn

2 thoughts on “The Planets Of The Solar System

  1. george

    Would be interested in the details of how you managed to get great pictures with your telescope. I have the same scope, very happy with it but would like to move into picture taking so I can share my cold nights results with others. What lens did you use, what camera, any software, etc.

    Thank you for your time and sharing the photos.

    George

  2. Jim

    Nice pictures. I’ve only just started astronomy as a hobby, with an Orion XT10i Intelliscope. Its a Newtonian Reflector on a Dobsonian base, which I am starting to discover makes astrophotography a little difficult since it does not have motors to enable equatorial tracking.

    Still I am able to take some photos and use K3CCDTools to take AVI’s and Registax to stack the frames and improve the photos. They are not bad results, but your photos of Mars and Jupiter are very nice, some good detail in Mars particularly, which I understand can be a bit difficult to photograph.

    I too use a webcam, a Phillips SPC900NC which is a similar spec and sensitivity to your Toucam, except I think mine allows the modification for the Steve Chambers “long exposure” mod to be made even easier, due to a redesign of the circuit board which brings the required connections away from the chips which are so tiny it makes soldering to them difficult on the Toucam. I have yet to make the SC LX mod, but I chose this webcam because of the ease of doing it.

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