Moons of Saturn through telescope

Titan, Tethys, Rhea, Dione, Iapetus are five bright moons of Saturn, the ring planet in our Solar system. They can be observed through amateur telescopes with at least 100mm (4 inches) of aperture. The following picture was taken through a 5 inch telescope, a Celestron NexStar 5 SE XLT. It is an image composed of 84 single subframes of 1 second of exposition each one.

It was taken on 2011-03-06 02h10mUT using a DBK 21AU04.AS Imaging Source CCD camera. Planet was recorded in a different exposition through a video stacked (shift and add) using Registax free software.

Check out the JPL simulation matching the picture above.

Jupiter’s galilean moons

Galilean moons are very easy to observe using some kind of instrument to get some magnification. With just a binoculars would be enough to spot the four moons of Jupiter. They are constantly rotating around Jupiter. Every day their relative distances and positions changes. Their names are Io, Callisto, Europa & Ganymede. They all have a similar size and brightness. When passing in front of the big planet, they cast a shadow over the gaseous surface of Jupiter. It is required a telescope to observe such events.

Here it is a picture I took tonight with a digital pocket camera through a 14mm eyepiece and a 150 mm newtonian reflector telescope with no-tracking system.