Again woke up at 4am, as is my pattern now I check the weather app and it says “mostly clear” so, ok, why sleep. I can go out and at least line up the finder scope to the camera… All photos here were done without the tracker, on a tripod– 200mm focal length, and yeah… maybe this was dumb but the lens at F8…
Well there was a nice moon out and Jupiter and Saturn… sooo… I used my bahtinov mask to focus in on Jupiter (since it’s nice and bright) and snapped this pic of it… focus ok, over exposed Jupiter, but I get 3 moons:
Then, I get the focus and exposure better, but no moons (unless I push some sliders in lightroom)
Then I take a shot of Saturn… oh… it is pretty far away at 200mm it’s just a few pixels, but you can imagine it’s overall shape:
That’s greatly cropped, but if you click on it I hope you can see it 🙂
And now what you’ve been waiting for… here is a nice pretty well focused and exposed shot of the moon:
I told myself i would not get up in the wee hours of the night for photos — I really need sleep, my new plan was ok, just do solar stuff till we get into winter when it gets dark enough while I’m still awake…
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