Jupiter through a 10 inch Mewlon telescope

Tonight I’ve enjoyed observing a visual of Jupiter through a Mewlon 250. Although there was turbulence, it was worth. I had never seen a Jupiter so detailed by telescope. I could depict up to four bands, the great red spot and both polar icecaps. Inside bands I  could see small details as well. Also it has showed up Jupiter’s satellite Europa at its limbo during the observation.

I’ve got the best visual results without barlow, only using  a 15 mm (200x magnification) eyepiece. When using a barlow 2x, obtaining 400x magnification, details were not so easy to detect.

The telescope is a reflector Takahashi Dall-Kirkham at f/12, yielding 3 meters of focal.

I have also realized that when sit down in a chair and keeping the vision of the planet during several minutes trying different focus, the eye eventually adapts to the brightness of the planet and increasingly captures more details.

Here it is a picture of the setup:

Sharing raw footage of Jupiter and Saturn

On 2011-02-06 I  took some videos of Jupiter and Saturn through a (4 inch) 102mm apochromatic refractor telescope. Applying Registax I got the results of the picture.

I’d like to share these two videos with anybody interested in playing with them:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/tqkri1z5z4pw8ge/Saturn-Takahashi-FS-102-F40-2011-02-06-divx.avi

http://www.mediafire.com/file/jbu38q5ucq9diwz/Jupiter-Takahashi-FS-102-F40-2011-02-06-divx.avi

Apochromatic vs Achromatic Refractor

People should think twice before purchasing an apochromatic refractor as opposed to an achromatic telescope. There is a huge difference in price and a small difference in performance according to an experiment I made recently.

In doing astrophotography, people use to spend a lot of money in equipment. It is important not to fall into the elitist apochromatic myth if you want to save some money.

I took a single 30 seconds shot to Pleiades open cluster (M45) using my 6-inch Sky-Watcher achromatic refractor that costs around 1,000 US$. Then I used a 6-inch apochromatic Takahashi TOA-150 that costs around 10,000 US$ to take an equivalent shot on the same field.

Resulting images speak by themselves. Obviously achromatic refractor shows a blue halo around stars, due to chromatic aberration. Nevertheless, a simple post-processing technique can remove the halo, obtaining a similar image to apochromatic’s.

Now, the question is: Is it worth paying the extra 9,000 US$?