During the summer of 2019, I took some first steps into Astronomy and Astrophotography. After discovering an ancient Novoflex Noflexar 400mm lens at a flea-market, and designing and printing an extension tube to connect it to my Olympus E-M10mkII Camera, I had a nice hacked-together setup to take some pictures of big things far away.

Novoflex Noflexar 400mm mounted with Olympus E-M10mkII

First target was the moon. This was actually a hand-held shot, the moon is quite bright and the image stabilization of the camera helps a lot.

The moon (400mm 1/320s F5.6)

After that, I went for the big planets. For those pictures, the setup was mounted on a travel tripod, which was extended with scrap wood.

I started with Saturn. Of course, there are by far better pictures of it, but for noob-me with some improvised equipment, it was very satisfiying to actually see the rings with my own eyes and camera

Saturn with rings

Next was Jupiter. This took some postprocessing in darktable and gimp, but I was able to capture the four Galilean moons. The reference chart was generated with the great tool at http://shallowsky.com/jupiter/. Unfortunately, I was not able to extract any structure of Jupiter itself from the pictures.

Jupiter with Galilean Moons

This is a test post to see if all of the tubes work.