Pictures from My 3D Printed Telescope, with Mount v3
I finally finished Hill Mount v3, so I put it to the test. I got the clearest phone-cam Saturn I’ve ever seen! Wobbles still exist if you touch the telescope, but the wobbles are much smaller now and go away if I wait a few seconds or use a short exposure time.
Before the wobbles settle down, if you take a picture with a big exposure time, the wobbles cause the image to have two Saturns.
I also got Jupiter again, and I could see two Galilean moons by eye but I couldn’t capture any using camera. I couldn’t see any of the stripes, though. Jupiter is way more featureless than I expected; I wonder if there are any cheap filters I can use to see more of the stripes.
In the last picture, I took a very long 4s exposure of Saturn. The earth’s rotation meant, Saturn blurred into a streak, but take a close look - there’s a smaller streak right next to it following Saturn! I think that’s one of its moons, possibly Titan! It’s so cool that I can see it from my backyard.
Things to improve:
- Make the mount even stiffer?
- How do I add damping, to make vibrations decay over time?
- Just as I was writing this, I discovered some smudges on my eyepiece. Oops! Maybe that’s adding some glare. Hopefully once I clean that I can get even sharper images!
- Try image stacking?