After days of waiting, the sky finally cleared. A few friends joined me for an evening under the stars, and after spending some time admiring late-summer favorites like M31 and M13, we turned our attention to the planets.
Saturn came first â and what a moment that was. If youâve never seen it through a telescope, youâll understand what I mean when I say we gazed at Saturn. That distant dot in the night sky suddenly became a world: a sphere, suspended in space, encircled by delicate rings and flanked by tiny moons. Without thinking much, I grabbed my smartphone and held it up to the eyepiece â and just like that, I had taken the very first astrophoto of my life.
Inspired by that moment, we decided to give the old Canon PowerShot SX240 HS a try. Using ocular projection, we clipped the camera in front of the 10mm eyepiece, now paired with a Barlow lens. We refocused on Saturn and fired off a handful of .jpeg images, followed by a short .mov video. The Canonâs video mode is fully automatic and offers little control, which made the footage dark and blurry. Focusing was tough, especially with such low light.
Still eager, we shifted to Mars. It was sitting low on the horizon â very low â and even through the eyepiece it appeared as a dancing reddish blur. We tried the same capture method, snapped a few shots, and decided that was enough for one night. It was time to see what we had.
Back inside, I opened up Autostakkert!2 and Registax for the first time. Processing those full-resolution .jpeg files was slow â each image was about 4MB, and I had no idea what half the buttons did. Drizzle? ROI? Alignment points? It was a world of its own. Eventually, I managed to stack a few frames, and then spent what felt like hours in Registax trying to sharpen them.
The results? Technically unimpressive â blurry images of Saturn and a soft red disc for Mars â but emotionally? Huge. You can clearly make out Saturnâs rings. Mars is a visible disk, not just a twinkling dot. These werenât polished results, but they were my results. The very beginning of a journey that I now know has no end.
Clear skies,
Chris