Jupiter is starting to come up in the middle of the night, so I decided to give it a try. Wow, it was much harder to get than I thought it would be! Dew was also a big problem again, and handling Barlow lenses and eyepieces would quickly coat the optics in the cold and humid night air. I finally thought to get a heat gun from the garage to heat up the optics to remove the dew, and then I would quickly pop them back into the telescope and try to take as many images as I could. The resulting subframes were really bad, but I tried my best to stack them and, with the magic that is wavelets, was able to get something that looked like Jupiter out of them.
I plan to try again in the coming weeks, as the planet will be up sooner and sooner, allowing me to get more imaging time before dew becomes a problem.
I first tried a two inch Barlow lens directly on the camera, but that didn’t really give me enough size to work with on the image. I then put in an eyepiece projection adapter with a 17mm eyepiece, and, boy, it was hard to find the planet with it! When I finally did, I took maybe 80 images of the planet as quickly as I could before dew started coating the eyepiece and the secondary mirror. By this point, it was 3:00 AM, and I had had enough. This will take a lot of work and practice to get better at, just like DSOs.
