Looking for advice on planetary imaging with 8" Newtonian - Forums

Topic starter

Oct 1, 2022

My family and friends would like me to take some images of planets and I was looking for some advice on equipment. I have an 8" Skywatcher Newtonian with a native focal length of 1000mm.

At the moment I was thinking of:

* The ASI662MC camera combined with a 3X or maybe at a stretch a 4X barlow

If you've done anything like this, I would welcome your thoughts.

I do know that I will be limited by the Dawes limit of my 8" primary and also by seeing conditions (guess I need to learn all about lucky imaging and processing).

Jacob Heppell

Oct 2, 2022

Before I bought a Skywatcher 10" quattro, I had an 8" goto dobsonian that I used for a bit of planetary and lunar photography. I used a televue 3x barlow for the extra reach. The camera was my Nikon D7500 DSLR. I was happy with the results I got. I'll attach a couple of examples. Basically I'd take a ~2min video, pre-process with PIPP to get the best frames and create an uncompressed video file from the off-camera mpeg, which Autostakkert then accepted as an input file and create a single image from the best few hundred frames. After that, a bit of wavelet sharpening in Registax, few adjustments in photoshop and job done.