Jupiter - Uranus conjunction

[george7378]

Hi everyone,

This is an image I took tonight of the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus - it's simple, but I'm pleased with it! I took it with my Lumix, afocally, with a 1 second exposure:

[Star child]

Nice, you got some of Jupiters moons as well! is this attached to a telescope or something? Im not to wise when it comes to equipment but this looks like a magnified view as you can see the disc of jupiter, and i had to do a longer exposure to pick out Uranus by just pointing my camera in the right direction, the longer exposure obvioulsy lead to slight streaking, yet yours are single points of light, can you explain how you did this? and what exactly does afocal mean?

[george7378]

Thanks for the comments - I think the moons are Europa, Ganymede and Callisto (Io's shadow was on Jupiter's disc at this time). This was my compact camera attached to look down my telescope's eyepiece with a simple bracket. It's a really simple and cheap setup, looking down a 25mm eyepiece at about 50X magnification, which gives you a pretty wide field of view, which means that you can do short exposures without getting the trailing. This was a 1 second shot, and I was just experimenting when I found out that it actually looked quite good, so I kept it. The key to avoiding trailing is to keep magnification low and exposures short (I also tried an 8 second exposure, and all the objects were badly streaked, so it looks like anything above 1 second shows trails).

[oldfruit]

For such a simple image i think it is really impressive. The colour of Uranus really stands out. Good capture.

[george7378]

For such a simple image i think it is really impressive. The colour of Uranus really stands out. Good capture.

Thanks I was observing Uranus last night too, and I got the best ever view of its small green disc - this was when the seeing settled down at 240X magnification.

[Star child]

Oooh that looks interesting (the bracket thing) and not to pricey as well, I may have to invest in one of those, I have taken pics through the eyepeice before but that was just by holding my camera as still as possible against the eye peice, the pics arnt amazing but you can tell what they are supposed to be.

Also my telescope does not have a motorised drive so i guess there will still be soem streaking even with 1 second, and i need to get it colimnated so i should get a new mount and colimnate the scope before i think about the bracket, but its nice to know you can buy such a thing, knowing my luck my camera will be the one type it doesnt fit!