I haven't tried my luck at capturing our planets for years now. But all the great pictures here on AstroBin have motivated me to finally use my Takahashi Mewlon for imaging. The 250 CRS has a fixed field corrector that flattens the entire field and fixes the disadvantages of the Ritchey-Chretien design. This is associated with a fixed working distance to the corrector. In the image trail, I had also integrated an ADC and a Televue Powermate. So all ingredients came together to confuse me properly!
Finally, I was able to set the correct distance provisionally via extension sleeves and also managed to focus. I have meanwhile received a custom-made adaptation, so that my next attempt will hopefully be a little easier...
What can I say? I captured some videos and I'm still surprised by the large amount of data! That's where a fast computer pays off. But as a DeepSky photographer it was definitely exciting to get familiar with the new software and to find a suitable workflow.
What I also noticed between the exposures is how much the result depends on the seeing! This is much more relaxed with doing DeepSky and the pixel scale used there. The seeing conditions can be clearly seen in my results...
Nevertheless I am very satisfied with my firstlight. As the icing on the cake, I also tried to visualize the resulting images in an animation (fortunately, the GRS was just becoming visible).
Jupiter had an altitude between 38 degrees (at the first exposure) and 35 degrees (at the last exposure) that evening. Hopefully more and better results will be possible in the upcoming years. I will stay tuned!
Last but not least a big thank you to
Jean-Baptiste Auroux for his motivating words to finally use the big Tak photographically and to
Darren, who (some time ago already) answered many technical questions for me (hopefully he still remembers our discussions) and gave me the advice to try out my available camera (ASI 294 MC Pro), which I actually use for DeepSky, as well.
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