Jupiter is beautifully placed in the southern sky at midnight just now, with no moon to spoil the show. You might remember my previous effort to capture it was not a great success. Since then, I’ve picked up a new x2 magnifier for my scope. (Called a “Barlow” in telescope-speak.) I got it for £20 on Ebay, which I consider a bit of a bargain. I’ve no idea if it was responsible for any improvements. There are a myriad of factors that can affect a picture on any one night. But here are the old and the new compared, with the new picture on the right.

This isn’t what you actually see through the telescope. It’s heavily cropped. The original picture looks more like this. This is a 1/60s exposure at iso 1600.

I don’t normally save “raw” images on the camera. But that night I accidentally had that option switched on, and I’m glad I did. Just a reminder, most images on the web are jpeg type files, or similar. These are compressed images. But the compression algorithm is lossy, it doesn’t preserve all the original information. All the images you see above are based on jpeg originals.

This can work very well for every day pictures in bright light. However, for high magnifications, every bit of detail is important. Raw images save every bit that is captured by the camera. And what a difference it makes. Here they are compared, with the raw image on the right.

As you can see, there’s a lot more detail in the raw compared to the jpeg image. This feeds through the image processing. I took a dozen images in rapid succession and stacked them using my favourite photo processing program, called “Siril”. This is the result (raw on the right).

And here’s that final image close up.

Given the cheap equipment, and basic processing, I’m fairly chuffed with this.

Having said that, Jupiter is by far the easiest planet to photograph. More massive than all the other planets combined, and able to swallow 1,000 earths whole, it presents an easy profile to photograph in the night sky. Mars is tiny in comparison, Saturn is much further away, and Venus is just a featureless, cloudy blob. Initial attempts to photograph them haven’t been an outstanding success so far. I’ll let you know if my efforts improve.

Meanwhile, back in the Andromeda galaxy. No telescope this time, just an old Carl Zeiss lens I found in the cupboard, This was only a brief test, iso 3200 4s x28, so under2 mins total exposure. Based on the result, this might be worth playing with a bit more.