Gas giants, wooden wobbles
I took my new wooden-dowel telescope mount for a spin, and got pictures of Jupiter and Saturn with my high-power eyepiece!
I took many pictures, and a few videos. I also figured out how to control the shutter speed on my phone’s camera, and got many photos at 1/40s shutter speed. Using a smaller shutter speed takes the planets from blinding white blurs to circular colored blurs, I assume because it lets in less light. It can make a planet go from blindingly white to almost completely disappearing into the night sky. However, my phone doesn’t let me control those settings when taking a video. The second and third images show the best raw pictures I got.
Saturn through my telescope had this weird diagonal smear to it. Since I’ve been fighting vibration issues with my wooden-dowel mount, I think it’s a very small high-frequency vibration from left to right causing that problem?
Then I tried using image processing software, Pipp plus autostakkert plus registrax, following this video tutorial. There were some shenanigans because Pipp’s site got taken down and I had to find a backup, but eventually I made the heavily processed Jupiter in the first image. Sadly, I haven’t figured out how to stack my photos because the software complained my images were different sizes (from before and after I pressed the “save as raw” button), but I was able to take a video of Jupiter without the high shutter speed setting and process that. It was a bit underwhelming - I went from dim blurry sphere to SLIGHTLY STRIPED dim blurry sphere! Wow! If there’s one thing I learned I suppose it’s that my telescope was out of focus.
I hope the pictures will be improved if I make a new mount using metal EMT pipes.