SharpCap Forums

Over the past few days, my son and I have been figuring out SharpCap and the SV305. Friday night, we overexposed Jupiter and Saturn...I'd like to pretend on purpose, but no...had the exposure WAY too high. Of course, with Saturn on Friday night we managed to get a nice photo of Titan.

That said, we applied what we learned to have success last night, through some clouds. To say we were excited was an understatement.

We had a process of turning the exposure up to "find the donut," which was the out-of-focus target showing the secondary mirror. Get it lined up, adjust the exposure down until we got it in focus with detail.

We used an Apertura AD8 with the SVBony SV305...I'd have to look at the file to get all the settings, but the exposure was around 40 ms.
If I'm not mistaken, it looks like a moon going behind Jupiter on the right.

Hi,

congratulations - those are excellent planetary images for first (or second or third) attempts

You do seem to have a moon emerging on the right side of Jupiter.

Were you using just the telescope and the camera or are you using a barlow lens to increase the scale of the image?

cheers,

Robin

Just the camera and telescope. Will probably try again with a Barlow on Saturday morning, provided the skies are clear. My son and I were tickled that we had success, expected it to be several tries before we got this result.

Eric

See my post in here for some ideas viewtopic.php?f=7&t=211. Also this viewtopic.php?f=35&t=1156.

Dave

The process you used in the first post isn't terribly different from what I did, don't remember reading that before. We just didn't use a barlow, but plan on it this weekend, provided the clouds cooperate.

That said, I did have your guide to Jupiter (and Saturn, for that matter) and I had noticed that your exposure time was (in the screenshot) like 242 ms. I didn't find out that that was not likely what you were using, to say the least (if it was, I have several other questions, then).

Eric

In the Jupiter document I had a Target name set as ‘Jupiter 685 x2’. This tells me I was using an IR685 filter and a 2x Barlow. Both of those will have had an impact on the exposure time - think the SER playback shows around 5fps. My general steps for Jupiter are:

• set gain to 70% of maximum

• using a logarithmic histogram, adjust exposure until histogram right hand side is around 80%

Saturn is dimmer so I use a gain of 80% and histogram at 80%. When using a Barlow I have had the gain as high as 90% to try to keep the fps up. With Saturn I never manage to achieve 10fps.

I live at 53°N and both Jupiter and Saturn have been around 10° elevation for the last couple of years which does not help.

Dave

Hi Eric

Great first captures! Almost as good as it gets when it comes to a first

Menno

Very nice! And especially with both planets being so low in elevation.
TimH

Not only this, but it was pretty cloudy. We had high level clouds the entire time, but we had a very short window when either was actually visible. I was beyond ecstatic.

We're going to try for Venus tonight. I know it won't be to any level of detail, but still practicing.

Here are my best shots (so far) of Saturn and Jupiter shot using a Celestron Nextar 8SE and SVBony 305 camera taken from my apartment balcony in central Melbourne. Really hope to get out into the countryside where skies are clear with no light pollution