Question by Natalia: Actual view trough a telescope?
I’ve been looking at images and videos of Jupiter and Saturn taken with 4″- 8″ amateur telescopes and in the comments I’ve read both statements that the details is worse/better with bare eye than a webcam/digital camera.
So i was wondering which one is true? Do you see better detail and sharper image when looking directly or is it much better trough a camera?
gn thanks for the nice answer.
Yes i am aware of the image stacking maybe i should have left out “images” out of my question.
The problem is I’ve never seen trough a telescope and i don’t know anyone nearby that has one to try it out. I am not interested in astrophotography though and i find this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g_1dCRf4SE&feature=related
very beautiful but since it is taken with a camera i’m not sure if i can use it as a reference.So will it look nearly as beautiful with a bare eye or will it look like a fuzzy, glowing white dot with a white line trough it ..or wil it look nothing like either of those.
Best answer:
Answer by gn
EDIT to “additional info: Well heck if you want to look through a scope you need to get yourself to a local star party. Find a club near you. If you want to BUY a scope, unfair, that’s another question! (it’s been asked here many times). I’m adding a link to Sky and Telescope’s directory of clubs.
The short answer is that in a *good* telescope of 4 to 5 inches aperture or more, the views of Saturn and Jupiter are breathtaking. Lots of people vote for Saturn, but my vote is for Jupiter, because there’s so much going on there. This year one of the belts disappeared, for starters. And it’s been hit by comets/meteors twice in the past year or so. The moons do transits across Jupiter, the moons occult each other, the moons emerge from Jupiter’s shadow sometimes, from an eclipse, as if materializing out of nowhere (as opposed to when they pop out of the edge or “limb”, which is their normal activity). Spots come and go. The blue swirls change. And yes, you can see it all, but I’d recommend a ten inch telescope or bigger. A very good quality four or five inch will however, show enough to keep you looking.
I watched the video. That was a very poor view of Saturn which reflected focus and other issues with the camera, maybe some chromatic aberration from the barlow or a poor eyepiece (that’s the blue fuzz around the planet). Possibly camera chromatic aberration. I wouldn’t even look at Saturn on a night like that. Try to imagine a crisp, tightly defined ball with vanilla creams and browns, that’s the orb of Saturn. The rings with a kind of chiseled appearance. That’s what you can see in a good scope (but not this year, the rings are on edge). That video only *hints* at what you can see.
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before edit:
The answer is yes and no. Damian Peach, who is a master of planetary imaging, has said that the views in the Caribbean are very similar to his stunning images.
The trick if you’ve ever been underwater in a swimming pool and looked up at people on the sides, you will see that the are all wavy and distorted by the waves of water. If you can get in a pool by yourself when the water is still, you would get a much better view.
The atmosphere ruins the view. It’s like a swimming pool. When it is really, really still: the views are fantastic.
But nowadays we can do something else: you put a webcam on a telescope and let it take 20 or 30 pictures a second. Then, using software, you throw out all the distorted images. Because even in very bad seeing, there’s usually a twentieth of a second or so that is good.
So you take 2000 pictures, throw out 1,700, and then take the remaining 300 good pictures and using a computer take the information (light, dark, shades of color) and average them together. This is called “stacking.” The result is you get the best 1/20th of a second, three hundred times, combined into a single image.
So the effects are marvelous, and typically better than what you can see in a telescope. Furthermore, individuals have different abilities to see colors, but the image stacking process helps concentrate those colors and make them easy to see.
So,
A. The photographs will typically be better
B. If you get an exceptional night and a good scope, the views sill begin to approach the photographs
C. A good view on an excellent night is better than a bad photograph, and there’s lots of those around.
But there is a different problem. If you are photographing “deep sky” (galaxies) the telescope is, as a rule, used differently. (there is a new technique called LUCKY that is like planetary imaging, but it is very new) Typically what is used is a *long exposure*, not 1/20th of a second but more like 5 to 10 minutes. The ccd chip accumulates the information (the light signals) and detects about 90% of the light that comes through the telescope. This is HUGELY more efficient than the eye.
So, as a rule, you may hear people say when looking at Saturn or Jupiter that “it looks like a photograph” because sometimes it does. But galaxies, even though they can be quite lovely to the eye, NEVER show the detail that they do in photographs.
On balance, web cam and long expousre ccd photography have the advantage. You can buy “eyepieces” that try to make this easy to access, such as the I3 image intensifying eyepiece or the Mallincam system. These are plug and play imaging systems for telescopes. You will get, on deep sky (not planets) image detection that is far more sensitive than a glass eyepiece.
But whether we are talking about planets or deep sky, there is something special to the view through an eyepiece. Jupiter is dynamic, you can watch it turn and move over the course of an hour. The eyepiece can show Saturn against a field of stars, the pictures never do that. When you look at a galaxy through a glass eyepiece, the light has actually come all that way into your eye.
So eyepiece observing is fantastic. Is it worth it? You have to ask yourself whether you prefer looking up birds on the Internet or in a book versus seeing them yourself on your back porch feeder or with a pair of binoculars. Audobon magazine might show you much better pictures of a bird than what you can see out in the country naked eye, or with binoculars, and you can look at the picture for hours, whereas you might only have a few seconds with the bird in nature. But I think most people like to “be there and see it themselves.”
That’s what observing with an eyepiece does.
Hope that helps,
GN
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