After almost one year of practicing astrophotography, i’m finally able to present 6 of our planets i shot in a single image. The planets are : Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
6 planets shot with a Skywatcher 150/750 and a Webcam
All the planets was shot from the same location (at Home in Tunis, Tunisia) and with the same equipement :
- Scope : Newtonian Skywatcher 150/750
- Mount : Neq3-2 RA motorised (no GoTo)
- Camera : Webcam Logitech C270
- Barlow x2 and Barlow x3
The first planet that i shot was Saturn it was in 2015. It was in good situation in the sky (more than 36° of altitude), visible to the naked eye and pointing it with the telescope through the finderscope is really easy.
Then i shot Jupiter and Mars. Both of them are also visible to the naked eye and realitively easy to shoot.
The most difficult planets to shoot was Uranus and Neptune as they are not visible from naked eyes and as my mount doesn’t have GoTo, it was really difficult to point them manually. I had to try to locate the position by the help of the software Stellarium and then compare what i see with the eyepiece to what the software give.
The last planet that i shot was Venus one week ago (see here : How to shoot Venus with a Webcam). Like Jupiter, Mars and Saturn it’s visible to the naked eyes. The difficulty was the very low altitude of the planet : only 16°. And objects below 30° will realy suffer of turbulence. The turbulence limited me for the magnification and i wasn’t able to use the Barlow x3 like i did for all the other planet but i used only a Barlow x2.