Space Photos

I have been taking some photos of planets.

This is Jupiter at a distance of about 800 million km.

This is Mars:

Taken with my Nikon D7000 via a T-mount and this telescope that I hired from the excellent Dark Sky Telescope Hire (It seems also be called a Classic 200P Dobsonian).

I’ve learned quite a lot about telescopes and the movements of planets (and that the ISS is very fast) from this adventure.

On the other hand I’ve also found it quite frustrating. Like a child, I expect any old telescope to let me see another planet filling the whole of my view like this:

(Image credit to NASA, via Wikipedia)

…whereas the reality is a little more disappointing. I find myself wondering what sort of telescope Galileo was using in 1610 when he identified four distinct moons of Jupiter. I’ll need to do some investigating of sites like this