I woke up early and saw Jupiter and Saturn!
Thoughts on the observing: I have two eyepieces, a high power 6mm and a low power 25mm. I couldn’t get a picture of the planets with my high power lens because my mount is too wobbly and I couldn’t find the planets once I mounted my phone on the telescope. I did see Jupiter through it amidst the wobbling, and it looked like a featureless white blob. I could barely make out some stripes, whichwas cool!
To get at least some pictures before the sun rose, I switched to my low power lens. Using that, I found Saturn! And as the sun began to rise, I switched back to Jupiter, and I could see it as just a big round bright circle… but also with some of the Galilean moons next to it! And then morning clouds rolled in and covered everything and I went home.
Instead of taking pictures, now I’m taking videos so I can extract the good frames afterwards. I took a video of Saturn while trying to focus the telescope, hoping I’d get a good level of focus somewhere. Turns out my phone’s autofocus didn’t like Saturn and kept trying to focus incorrectly.
What that means is: as cool as these photos are I need to aim my telescope better, I need to focus better (I did find the button to turn off phone autofocus!), and if I do that, I can get even better photos with the higher powered zoom lens! There’s a ton of potential for improvement.