Telescope Reviews: Another Jupiter with handguided dob

From 8/8/08. I was just playing around with displaying live images on my laptop in preparation for a public star party tonight. Sometimes small children have a difficult time reaching the eyepiece, so I thought I'd set up the laptop and give them some views of the moon and Jupiter on the screen.

I was testing out the setup when Jupiter broke through the clouds, so I captured this. The seeing was just okay, but it's one of the better pics I've gotten this year. I upped the magnification some and it seems to help (1250 mm fl / 20 mm ep * 30x optical zoom on camcorder = 1875 X if you believe the optical zoom on the camera).

I use a Panasonic DV camcorder instead of a webcam, and it has image stabilization that helps me keep the things steady at these magnifications, but it's still tricky to keep the planet in view by hand. I used to just place the planet off the edge and let it drift through the view, then reposition and repeat. But I actually kept the scope moving for this pic and it seemed to work okay. I don't have to spend as much time editing out out-of-frame segments this way.

--------------------
Jeff Chappell
Orion XT10