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pineapplecooqie t1_iy0s8jg wrote

unless your zoom lens is a literal telescope by some other name, that sort of resolution of outer planets is absolutely not possible. I call bullshit

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Maidwell t1_iy0sv15 wrote

Did you read OPs main comment? They explain the whole process there and the editing of the outer planets.

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[deleted] t1_iy0to0z wrote

[removed]

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andrea_g_amato_art OP t1_iy0v231 wrote

Maybe you’re just bad lol (jk)

Keep in mind that I have trashed hundreds and hundreds of pictures. These results were accomplished with long videos stacked under almost perfect seeing conditions, during the closest approach of each planet. (There’s a reason this project took so long!). Also, some of them were enlarged for the final composite, but that’s about it. Aside from Uranus and Neptune, where I adjusted the color and smoothed the pics a bit, everything else is legit, I have the .tiff files that came from the stacking, I don’t know how else to prove it. I can assure you, if you take some time to do a quick search on Google, you will find other pictures like mine taken with my same equipment. Feel free to believe what you want, I haven’t lied, that’s for sure.

I take your comment as a huge compliment by the way, it means I really am a decent astrophotographer after all, ha!

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iveseenthelight t1_iy0svko wrote

The p1000 has a lens with a focal range of 24-3000mm. So these are well within the realm of possibility for that camera.

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andrea_g_amato_art OP t1_iy0u0y4 wrote

Yep! I did say it had a ‘super-zoom lens’, so while not technically a telescope, with a bit of perseverance and stacking anyone can accomplish what I did!

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rocketsocks t1_iy15op5 wrote

Camera lenses are literally telescopes. The OP is using a 105mm lens which is equivalent to a small refracting telescope (4"). The diffraction limit on an aperture that size is around 1.5 arcseconds, which is enough to resolve most naked eye planets into multiple pixels. Jupiter is up to 50 arcseconds across, Mars is up to 25.

Many refracting telescopes have smaller apertures, and "good" amateur telescopes start out at not much larger (at 6" or 8" apertures). Of note, Galileo Galilei's telescopes had apertures of 15mm, 26mm, and 38mm, which he used starting in 1609, 1612, and 1620, respectively. Newton's pioneering reflecting telescope, built in 1668, had an aperture of 2 inches (50mm).

The main constraint is always going to be atmospheric seeing. Which is where digital photographic techniques and stacking comes into play. With a modern top tier astronomical observatory they would use adaptive optics to cancel out the effects of atmospheric distortion. If you don't have that option you can simply use lots and lots of individual exposures. Each exposure represents a snapshot of the atmospheric conditions at a particular moment. If you're lucky you can get a single frame or a part of a single frame where by chance the air happens to be just right to have a minimal amount of distortion and blurring. With enough frames you can use a computer to select the individual frames and portions of frames with the best seeing and digitally combine them together to improve the overall signal to noise ratio of the final image. This allows you to approximate the performance of the same optics without atmospheric distortion.

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KristnSchaalisahorse t1_iy4yg3e wrote

For the planetary images they used a Nikon P1000 superzoom camera with a focal range of 24-3000mm (full-frame equivalent).

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andrea_g_amato_art OP t1_iy0tr0g wrote

Look on Google Images ‘Nikon P1000 Saturn’ or ‘Nikon P1000 Jupiter’ etc… Once you stack hundreds and hundreds of frames, the pictures turn out great!

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TrailWhale t1_iy1vk52 wrote

I thought the same thing, assuming most superzoom cameras were generally in the 10-15x zoom range so maybe 400mm tops. Then I looked up the P1000, turns out that thing is a absolute beast with a 24-3000mm zoom. I believe it now.

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