Focus on Jupiter — Loran Hughes Astrophotography

The night of June 1st was the clearest in a while and I was anticipating it - maybe too much. I didn't sleep well the night before and was dead tired. Then again, maybe that was a good thing. I kept things simple, opting to control the telescope from the hand controller rather than the laptop. My brain was in no mood to over-think things.

I knew my time was limited - Jupiter slips behind a tree at about 10:30 pm. And did I mention that I could barely keep my eyes open? I lined up on Polaris as soon as it was visible, ran the Starsense Autoalign and slewed to Jupiter. But my focus... yeash!

I'm using SharpCap imaging software and it has a handy focusing aid that uses edge detection. It gives your focus a numeric value - the higher, the better your focus. I have to say that it worked pretty well.

I succeeded in getting the best image of Jupiter that I've gotten to date. There's still room for improvement, but I consider this a major step in my astrophotography journey.

After Jupiter ducked behind the neighbor's tree, I decided to learn to focus with a Bahtinov mask. I set my sights on the red giant Arcturus and put the mask on the business end of the scope. The diffraction pattern indicated that my focus was somewhat off, which would have been nice to know before I imaged Jupiter. Next time I'll do things in a slightly different order.

So how much did my view of Jupiter improve? You be the judge. I was actually pleased with the image on the left last year. Yikes.

I'd like to get another shot at this gas giant before I set my sights on Saturn at the end of the month. In any case, I'm off to take a nap first.