In 1979, these were some of the best images NASA was able to take of Saturn using the Pioneer 11 satellite at a cost of $155 million US dollars. This weekend, I took a photo of the same planet from my back yard using equipment that you can walk into any astronomy store and buy off the shelf. And my photo looks like this. Now, telescopes haven't changed much since 1979. Essentially, you could take a photo like this using the same telescope that people were using back then. And it would be essentially the same. What has changed, however, are improvements in digital photography. In fact, the introduction of digital photography at all plus improvements in software processing and image acquisition that has really unlocked the ability to process an image like this. I'm going to show you how to take a photo of a planet. I'm going to show you how I took a photo of this planet, Saturn, step you through the process, everything you need. Essentially, it's just a telescope and a digital camera and a computer to process the images on with basically freely available software. My name is Dylan O'Donnell and you're watching Star Stuff. Now, the first thing that I had to do was take down the rassa because I was using this wide-field telescope very fast, very good for deep space objects. But what I want is something that goes really far. So I put on the C11. Obviously, the bigger the telescope, the better for planets, particularly. And you know what they say about someone with a big telescope. Massive Pp. So obviously, after the telescope is set up, it's the camera. That's the main thing we need to look at. Super quick description of my image train here. You can use any camera you want. You can even use a phone as long as it takes video. That is the goal here. But what I'm using is a ZW174 and to describe the image train, I've got an extension tube here so that we can reach focus. I have a 2.5 times power mate. So that takes my focal length from 2800mm all the way up to whatever just popped up on the screen there. And then I've got some spaces here, again, to reach the right back focal distance. I have a ZWO EWF filter wheel which has red, green and blue filters. You don't necessarily need that. This could be a colour camera or if you're using a phone, it's obviously a colour camera, same with the DSLR. To get the best out of planets, it's best to have a dedicated astronomy camera that's mono so you can take a separate channel in red, green and blue. That works really well. Now, even though this is a go-to telescope, I didn't actually use go-to to find the planet. They're pretty obvious in the sky. They're very bright looking stars and you can move your telescope towards it manually using the hand controller or whatever. Obviously, it needs to be tracking and sedereal so it is tracking the motion of the sky. So essentially, this thing, the fine scope, becomes really important. Because when we zoomed in really fast, you use the fine scope as long as it's properly aligned to just make sure that you have it in the crosshairs and then it will be on the camera view itself. If you are struggling to find the planet because you are so far zoomed in, what I've been using is spiral search. EQ Mod has this lovely little button called spiral search. So if you're in the area, you hit that and it starts moving the telescope in a spiral until you can see the planet. That's a really great way to find it. OK, so now you just have to take a video of the planet. You're looking at the planet, make sure you're exposing correctly. So make sure that you are not overexposing or under exposing. I use the histogram here. This is Fire Capture. I've spoken about Fire Capture before. I have a great video about that. So go check that out if you need to know this. Here obviously I'm taking a photo of Jupiter. Now depending on the planet, the length of your video may change because Saturn is quite uniform, I actually went for a full five minute video on each channel. So that's five minutes red, five minutes green, five minutes blue. And let's process that data now. We've got our video files. Here they are. They're SER files from Fire Capture. We are going to drag them into Auto Stack it here. So open up Auto Stack it and drag your file across and you'll get this dialog here. You want to make sure it's set to Planet. We want to hit Analyze which will essentially grave the images and give us a nice little graph showing us how much were really good quality photos, which are the peaks here and which ones were terrible, which would be down the bottom. That is lucky imaging. So we're going to shave off say 12% and use the best 12% in these stacks. I'm going to go to Drizzle 1.5. Now I'm going to head over here, set my alignment points. That's too big. So I'm going to pull this down, say around 5060 and I'm going to tick close to the edge and place APs. And now we're all ready to stack. The only other thing I should mention here is that I want to tick sharpen so that there's a decomballoted sharpened version and I'm going to blend in raw for 0%. So it's just purely the sharp version of this stack. Hit Stack it doesn't take too long and we should end up with a folder here. And there we have it. We have a Drizzled file and it has conv here. So this one is the one that is the stacked and decomballoted version and it looks pretty damn sharp, doesn't it? See the searing there? I think that looks pretty good. So we're going to do the same thing for the red and the blue channel and then take our favorite sharp stacks and put them all together in Photoshop. Open up these three channels in Photoshop. They're pretty small looking but that's what you get with planets. Now this is my process. It's not necessarily the best process but this is how I do it. So I'm in the red. No, I'm in blue here. There's red. Blue and green. I think green maybe is looking the best. So we use that as the main channel. Command A to select all, paste it in as a new layer. We're going to go to image mode, change it to RGB, don't flatten. Now we're going to go over and grab the layer by copying that, coming back over to green and then we are going to go into channels here and paste that into blue. Then we go over to red, copy that, go back to our green one, paste it into the red channel here and we have a funky looking image. The colors are off though, right? So I'm going to go to image and auto color, which I think just does really well. The other thing I'm going to do here is go to add adjustment layer hue and saturation. Just make that a little more saturated. Yeah, that's looking good. And I'm going to change the blending layer here to color. So that we go over the top of our green layer. And I'll add another adjustment layer here for levels and just pull those levels up a bit. So we're not clipping but we just get that brightness to maximum basically before it starts to clip. That looks pretty good. Now the other thing is obviously we want to do some denoise. So do the denoise of your choice. Here we go, layer and topaz denoise or you might just want to do some dust and scratches, whatever suits you to just bring that noise down a bit. And we end up with a pretty decent looking image. There you go. That's how to take a photo of a planet. Now it's possible that you are new to this hobby which is not uncommon right now. There are a lot of people coming into astrophotography and I completely understand why. You are at home, you are working from home, you need an escape and there's no better escape than exploring the universe from the confines of your own home. So if you are interested in building out your rig, do check out Highpoint Scientific. Highpoint Scientific and American vendor, they have great prices, they stock all brands and they fully support their equipment. So do check them out and feel free to ask questions about your astrophotography journey and what you're trying to achieve and they will definitely help you out. Links down in the description below and drop my name so they know that I sent you. I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope that it helps you fill in some of the blanks if you are trying to take a photo of a planet or if you're just starting out and wanted to know the steps from the beginning. I hope everybody is going well and huge thank you and welcome to all the new lockdown astronomers. I know exactly where you're at. My name is Dylan O'Donnell, you've been watching Star Stuff. Remember, everything is meaningless and we're all going to die.