Jupiter and Venus

On Monday 15th January I set up my Skywatcher 80ED Pro refractor in the garden and also the Philips Toucam Webcam with my laptop. The sky is clear and at about 5.30pm I can see both Venus and Jupiter together in the sky.

It took some time to set up the telescope because I needed three objects to align the SLT mount and I could only see two until it got a little darker. First I tried to take some images of Venus before it sank slowly in the South West. I used both the 2x Barlow and later the 3x Barlow along with the webcam to capture the images. I then captured around 2000 frames at 15 fps with the Philips Toucam.

After that I moved the telescope to track Jupiter and repeated the same thing again as with Venus.

With the image of Venus you can see some 'false colours' which is probably caused by the effects of using a refractor telescope. Maybe the Skywatcher 130m reflector would have been a better choice for imaging Venus as it is so bright.

Jupiter looks amazing, you can see the 'Great Red Spot' on the cloudbands at the top left and also a dark spot called a 'Barge' at the lower right in the cloud bands. These are storms in Jupiter's atmosphere.