bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

I have used the RX10 IV on both Jupiter and Saturn with a degree of success; however, even at 600mm both are going to be very small in the field-of-view! For reasonable surface features of these planets a 3000-6000mm lens/telescope (with great sky conditions) is best.

The camera will autofocus on Jupiter quite easily so no concern about getting a good focus. Simply autofocus and lock the focus. Use Manual Mode and try exposures around 1/200 to 1/400 sec. for some surface detail on the planet.

bwa

TallTree

Maybe a Bahtinov Focus Mask will help placed on the end of the lens, allows focusing on a pin point of light.

bbradford Loc: Wake Forest NC

Dont feel bad been trying for 3 months with no luck. Tried everything

TRSquared Loc: South Carolina

If you are working at 600 mm, that lens is sufficient to show Saturn's rings in steady air when Saturn is high in the sky. You might be doing pretty well with what have tried because at the present time the planet is low in the sky and atmospheric turbulence (seeing conditions to the astronomer) is severe. From my location the planet is only 11° above the horizon 30 minutes after sunset. That fact means there is 5 times as much atmosphere between your lens and the planet compared to when the planet is high in the sky and that number grows to almost 10 times over the next 30 minutes. Much of that air is close to the ground that has been heated for the last few hours by the sun causing plenty of local air convection to distort your view. Atmosphere is a killer and that is why NASA went to the expense of putting the Hubble telescope in orbit and why astronomers locate their observatories on high mountains when possible.

As for exposure a good starting place can be found using the "sunny f/16 rule". Start with the ISO set at the highest value that shows very little noise. Let's use ISO 1600 for an example. Outside on planet Earth the rule gives an exposure of 1/1600 sec at f/16 which is equal to 1/25 sec at f/128. Now Saturn is in full sunlight just as the surface of the Earth but because Saturn is 10 times farther from the Sun, the light falling on it is a hundredths as bright as sunlight on the Earth. A hundredths as bright is between 6 and 7 stops on the cameras, so using 7 stops to avoid fractions, we get a Saturn starting exposure of 1/25 sec at f/11 using an ISO of 1600. That exposure is for Saturn high in the sky where the atmosphere does not dim the planet very much. Now that Saturn is so low, an exposure of 1/10 or 1/5 at f/11 compensates for the extinction by the atmosphere. If you are shooting wide open on the Sony DSC-RX10 IV at 600mm, then that would give you a starting exposure of 1/50 sec at f/4 but you might need even longer exposure times because of extinction. That exposure is not short enough to eliminate all the effects of atmospheric turbulence which cause the planet to dance around during the exposure. That effect in part perhaps explains the blobs you got. During the conjunction a few days ago I had an image of Saturn where the tip of one side of the rings system was turned up and the other side turned down by the turbulence even though the exposure was short enough top stop the dance of the image.

There is another factor to consider when a planet is as low as Saturn now is. The only solution to this problem that I am aware of cannot be implemented unless the DSLR is attached to a telescope rather than a conventional telephoto lens. That factor is atmospheric dispersion (the prism effect) where the atmosphere causes the top of the planet to have a red color and the bottom to show a blue tint with a significant loss of sharpness resulting from the effect as light is smeared in the vertical direction according to its color. When using a telescope something called an ADC (atmospheric dispersion corrector) is inserted in the light path and adjusted to cancel out the effect. There are inexpensive ones ($100-$200) but optical analysis shows they degrade the resolution possible with a given telescope even as they correct for dispersion. The good ones I am aware of begin at $4,000. Mine is from Gutekunst Optiksysteme (http://gutekunst-optiksysteme.com).

The folks out there making detailed pictures of the planets with modest size telescopes (5 to 8- inch objectives) go to great lengths to get their results. They will have a good ADC and match the telescope/lens focal length to the camera pixel size and I think all of them make movies, then let the software go through the movies and save those frames where the atmosphere is steady. Then those frames are stacked and aligned and averaged into a single image that is sharpened using special algorithms. The really good astrophotographers make images that can hold their own next to a Hubble telescope picture of the same planet. I am not saying the images are as sharp, but it is difficult to find a feature in the Hubble picture that can not also be detected in the other one.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

The only way I have been able to get good shots of the planets is with a long focal length (2000mm to 8000mm) and taking a video of the planet. With a video you can acquire 100's or even 1000's of images and then stack them with freeware programs like AutoStakkert or Registax6 and use Registax6 or other programs to sharpen the image with wavelet processing or sharpening methods. Typically you would need a telescope and tracking mount to take a minute or two of video to get enough images. Stacking the images helps average out atmospheric turbulence which is amplified by the needed long focal length and is really needed when the planet is not real high in the sky. To focus the image you need a camera that can be connected to a laptop to view the image on the screen and carefully focus (Many DSLRs have this this ability via a USB port as does the planetary camera).
Another issue than can effect your results is atmospheric dispersion where the atmospheric acts like a prism and splits the colors a bit to have a red ring on one side and a blue ring on the other. This most noticeable when the planets is less than 30 degrees above the horizon. Here Registax6 can help with its easy ability to slightly shift the position of the red and blue channels to correct the to some extent. There are also dispersion corrector available that can be inserted before the camera into a telescope eyepiece holder (I haven't tried it yet but I expect to next year when Jupiter and Saturn start coming up in the morning).

Here a couple of examples of Saturn (and a couple of other planets in one of the posts) using video with a DSLR.
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-648341-1.html
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-600633-1.html
Here is an example of Saturn using video with a CMOS camera made for planetary imaging.
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-670769-1.html


Note: The time at which the DSLR was used Saturn was higher in the sky than when the planetary camera was used and gave it a bit of an advantage but in general the planetary camera will out perform the DSLR for this purpose.
Good luck with you imaging and feel free to ask questions.

shutterbob Loc: Tucson

I tried for a few nights to shoot the conjunction. Finally was semi-successful with my Nikon D750 at iso 800, 1/640 sec, f8, at 600mm on a Sigma 150-600 C. Needed to do a fair amount of cropping but Saturn and it's rings came out very nice. Jupiter was over exposed but I got what I wanted.

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

Because the earth and our moon are both about the same distance from the sun, Sunny 16 (1/ISO @ f/16) works for both.

But Saturn is almost 900 million miles from the sun or about 9½ times as far away as the earth so it takes several stops more exposure than Sunny 16 to get a proper exposure. Maybe 9½ stops (or just 3), someone please check my math.

But using a zoom lens to capture Saturn is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

I took the moon image below about 40 years ago on Ektachrome 400 using a Nikon FE on a Celestron mirror telescope with an equatorial mount. The telescope had the equivalent of a 1500mm full frame lens.

Even though I could see the rings of Saturn looking through the telescope I had no hope of getting a clear shot. Astronomy from the middle of a large city (Miami) and this result pretty much ended my desire to invest more in equipment.

Cropped to a square image, full height

(Download)

profbowman Loc: Harrisonburg, VA, USA

One more hint that might help some persons working with Jupiter or with Jupiter and Saturn.

There is nothing wrong with using an over-exposed photo to get the four Galilean moons of Jupiter and then using an underexposed photo to get the atmospheric details of Jupiter and merging the two together for a final photo.

Somewhere I have buried a photo made that way if I can remember the folder I put it in so I could find it again. :( This should also work for anyone trying to capture Jupiter and Saturn at conjunction. I have not gotten out to see that yet but have seen such events when I taught astronomy for many years. --Richard

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi profbowman
I recently used this technique for images of the Jupiter Saturn conjunction, due to the large difference in brightness of, Jupiter, Saturn and their respective moons.
Below are examples of this from December 18th and December 21st.
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-678596-1.html
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-679025-1.html

profbowman Loc: Harrisonburg, VA, USA

Hey, Ballard, they are very good. Thanks for sharing. When I was in my teenage years, I thought conjunction meant the planets were on top of each other from our perspective. Your phots show clearly only that they were sort of close. --Richard

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi profbowman
Yep they were ~5 arc minutes apart and it will be 60 years before they get that close again from our perspective. Indeed a conjunction means close (not sure how close they have to be to qualify as a conjunction however). A Transit is when one moves in front of the other. The link below shows a transit of mercury with the sun.

https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-618831-1.html