The Moon + Four Gas Giants = One Epic Imaging Night!

With a new Gemini electronic focuser on his FirstLight Maksutov-Cassegrain 152 mm telescope, on the night of Oct. 3, Steve Bellavia set up to do a quick test on the moon.

He was tired, so that’s all he planned to do. At 94% illumination, the 12.4-day-old moon presented a bright target, with the terminator shadow casting darkness onto what would take a few more days to be fully lit.

Steve Bellavia’s image of the moon shows the crater Cavendish at the top, with the brighter Cavendish E on its lower rim.  Directly below that is Vieta with Fourier to its right. Much further down is Schickard, the largest in the image, with Drebbel above it. And just below  Schickard , near the bottom of the image, is crater Wargentin, which is completely filled to the rim with solidified lava.

Once done with his test, Saturn had risen above the tree line, so he pointed the telescope there and went to work taking video of the ringed planet.

He takes video because the fast exposures – 30 frames a second – allow the camera to capture moments of great seeing. He then uses a program to break the video into individual frames, then uses another program to analyze them for sharpness, selecting only the best images.

Then, he stacks them, manipulates the color and other details to get a finished image.

By 6 am, he’d done the work to get imaging runs on all four gas giants –Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

The results are spectacular.

In addition to the FirstLight Maksutov-Cassegrain 152 mm telescope, Steve used a ZWO ASI290MC camera using a Astronomik L-2 Luminance UV/IR Block 1.25-inch filter. The telescope was mounted on a Sky-Watcher EQ6R-Pro mount, and the software programs used to manipulate the images were SharpCap, AutoStakkert and AstroSurface.