Sky Watcher Star Adventurer for planetary images

[peterpixel]

Hi

 

Justa simple question but could I use a Sky Watcher Star Adventurer with a DSLR and a 200mm lens to capture decent images of say  saturn and jupiter? Its mostly advertised for seep sky but I also want to try the planets too.

[Crackabarrel]

The star adventure should be up for the job, however the FL might be a bit too short.

For reference here is Jupiter with an APSC sensor at 430mm FL, nothing stopping you giving it a go though, be interested to see what you get.

[vlaiv]

Star adventurer will do the job, but if you want to get anything decent out of it - think of putting a small scope on it rather than using lens and using guiding / planetary camera instead of DSLR.

Even something like this will be miles ahead of simple lens:

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/maksutov/skywatcher-skymax-90-ota.html

 

[peterpixel]

Yes thats a good option, seems a pity as I have some excellent pro lenses for my Olypus M4/3 camera. I just want a small portable compact rig that I can do some astrophotography with.

[vlaiv]

56 minutes ago, peterpixel said:

Yes thats a good option, seems a pity as I have some excellent pro lenses for my Olypus M4/3 camera. I just want a small portable compact rig that I can do some astrophotography with.

You can do astrophotography with lens - but you can't really capture planetary images with that combination.

Len's are really unsuited for planetary work as planetary work requires long focal length telescopes with sharp optics. Lens are not diffraction limited, they are good for wide field work where you don't need all the resolution, but for planets you want all the sharpness you can get and that really means a telescope.

3"-4" of aperture is really only starting to be enough for small amount of detail on planets. For more serious images - you need a lot of aperture to have resolving power to capture detail.

Even 4" Maksutov (102mm one) will only capture images like these:

And that requires special type of capture and processing - planetary camera with very fast frame rate - exposures of 5-6ms and a lot of them - like 10000 or more. In the end you stack only something like 5% of captured frames and you need to process that with different sharpening routines.