For a long time i struggled with getting top quality images out of my large planetary setup due to the atmosphere, but one night was unexpectedly excellent. The target i pointed my telescope at was the moon.
So for some background my setup is a 406mm aperture dobsonian telescope with a native focal length of 1800mm. The telescope is pretty much as upgraded as it can be. Everything is fully computerized and connected via ASCOM.
My full setup during that night included:
The telescope (obviously)
ASI462MM monochromatic planetary camera
x4 TeleVue Powermate - increasing effective focal length to 7200mm
ZWO IR/UV cut
ZWO ADC (atmospheric dispersion corrector)
Other gear: ZWO electronic auto focuser + ZWO camera rotator + Autoguider (custom) + SynScan system (guiding, go-to, identification, pc control)
Now whats surprising about this particular night is not only how good the image i got compared to what i had earlier but how meteoblue and other sites failed at predicting conditions. Even the stars seemed to disagree - more on that later. So the forecast predicted clear sky and extremely poor seeing, i thought id still go outside to explore the sky a bit, spend some time outside with my telescope just to relax, even if the conditions wont be worth using for imaging anything. So i went outside and set the telescope up, first thing i notice with my naked eye: stars are twinkling violently even at the zenith, near the horizon they pretty much vanished and reappeared every second. So i thought to myself that yea this makes sense, the thermal currents are active and strong so the seeing will be terrible. And thats where i was wrong, and so was meteoblue and so were other astronomy weather sites. I pointed the telescope at the moon to align it and see if everything works. The image boils rapidly… but every few frames there is an instant where the image becomes razor sharp, as if i was looking trough Hubble. I never experienced something like this and it was a stunning experience. It didnt last long as the clouds rolled in completely blocking the view just 30 minutes later, but i was able to take this one image by stacking 2% of the best frames from a 20 min period.
📷 HadleyRille.png
If you are familiar with lunar landscape you will recognize this beautiful feature named Hadley Rille
Recorded with a pixel scale of 1px / 0.07” at about 250 FPS with an exposure time of 2ms per frame
After analysing the image closely using LROC images as reference i found that the smallest detected crater in this image measures just 150m across
Before the clouds fully covered the sky i was able to get some data of the Jovian Moons, which i used to produce the composite below
I swapped the ASI462MM for Uranus-C for this one
📷 JovianMoons.png
I verified the patches on the moons are features and not noise using winJUPOS
I tried jupiter but despite the sharp windows i wasnt able to focus the telescope with all the boiling and the clouds were closing in quickly, so i moved onto the moons which were near point-sources making them easier to focus on. The clouds took over just as was finishing the last major Jovian moon
Now my question to experienced people here, is this - the two images - the diffraction limit of my telescope? Or can i still do better when the conditions will be right?
