This past month has been all about the planets; on show in the night sky have been Mercury low down on the western horizon, then the pretty quarter phase of Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, then dusty Mars all on view right across the ecliptic.
I set up my 10inch Meade LX200 Schmidt-cassegrain telescope here at home on the 31st July in the hope of capturing as much detail on the surface of Mars over the coming weeks and because of the extremely fine weather that we’ve had that’s where the telescope has been ever since. (I’ve made sure that the telescope has been covered up and protected)
Unfortunately Mars has had that huge dust storm on the surface so not much detail has been observed which is such a shame, because this years very close opposition was going to be just spectacular with Mars at only 58 million kilometres away from Earth.
So while out taking pictures of Mars I also had fun capturing all the other planets too, which I’ve put together in this montage of images that were all taken on the night of the 9th August 2018. Please note, that all the planets are to scale in size, just look at how huge Mars is as compared with the body of Saturn…now that’s amazing!
All images were taken with a Meade 10inch LX200 telescope and a ZWO ASI 120 MC-S colour CCD camera with a 3x Barlow attached. AVI movie files were captured and then processed in RegiStax6 and PS CS4.