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Ville Puoskari

A glimpse of our solar system

Sometimes when my main rig is taking pictures of deep sky objects I venture outside to do some lucky imaging of moon and planets or the Sun. This autumn has been great time for observations of Jupiter and Mars, I use my trusty 200mm f/6 Newtonian reflector on a cheap equatorial mount. Compared to my Losmandy G11 it's terrible, but its okay for planetary work. I can select slew speed between 1, 8 and 32x sidereal speed which is all I need to correct for bad polar aligment. My imaging train is fairly simple too on this setup. A 2x barlow lens combined with small pixels of ASI178MM gives plenty of oversampling to get the most out of generally bad seeing here in Finland. For filters I use only 850nm IR-pass which seems to work great especially on Mars. Here are some results of this setup:

In the summer I do some solar imaging as well with my Helios 100mm f/5 achromat using the same camera and barlow. For solar filter I use Calcium K-line wedge made by Antlia. This setup is mounted on a SkyWatcher Star Adventurer for portablity. I often take it with me on star parties too because it's so simple and lightweight. I can also swap out the solar wedge to a diagonal mirror and an eyepiece to do some visual observations of deep sky objects. It's always fun to surf along the milky way with low power eyepiece!


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