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Imaging Planets

Today there are a number of techniques to image the Planets.
Principally, this is restricted to imaging the bright Planets - Venus, Mars [when at its closest], Jupiter and Saturn.
On this page you can see a few images of the planets using one of two techniques:
1) Using a large Telescope - with a long focal length - as an effective 'Telephoto lens' with a DSLR camera placed at its focal pount
or
2) Again using a sizeable telescope but this time utilising an un-modified 'web-cam' - making use of image stacking software
Both of thes techniques rely also on using Image processing software

Jupiter - as imaged on 27th October 2010.
The image was taken using an un-modified Canon 350d DSLR camera.
The camera was placed at the focal point of a Meade 16-inch LX200 Telescope.
The following camera settings were used:
ASA 400
1 second exposure
f/10
You can see three of the four Galilean Moons

Jupiter - as imaged on 30th October 2010
This image was the result of processing of an avi video stream from a standard webcam [Philips Toucam II PCVC840K - with UV/IR cut-off filter attached to the nosepiece].
 The telescope used was a 16-inch Meade LX200 at f/10.
From a stream of about 4000 frames [at 25 fps] and using Registax to register and stack the frames.
Some slight processing was done using Paint Shop Pro 13 to make slight adjustments and convert the image form TIFF to JPEG file format