Neptune tonight

With Neptune nearing opposition I gave imaging it a go tonight.
It took a good while to get it to come into focus in the frame of the webcam through the ETX.
I also tried to use qa 2X barlow but it's too faint to pick up on the chip of the webcam.
It was only mag +7.84 and few degrees from the full Moon but the blue colour is still very noticable.
(I did no colour adjusting in this image)




Its a stack of a few hundred frames out of 2000.

I'll give it another go around the Perseids with a DSLR (when the sky is actually dark) to see can I get Triton.
I expect I'll have to overexpose the shot to catch it.

What is your field of view there Frank? It's amazingly small, even with your ETX! Nice to see the blue all the same, it's been a while.

I tried it a few years ago also with the toucam, and it was very small aswell, the colour is about all I could get .

Seanie, the shot is with just the webcam at prime focus.
(No IR cut filter or barlows)
I'm not sure what the FOV would be, but Neptunes' diameter now is 2.3''.

As far as I know it's not possible to image Neptune with a barlow unless
you mod the (Philips spc900 webcam) camera to allow it to take longer exposures.
I guess unless you have a much bigger scope the disc is gonna be pretty small.

I give resizing it a go in Registax to see can I get it any bigger without
pixelating it.

Neptunes' diameter now is 2.3''.

That's 2.3 arcminutes, right? (arcminute=X.Y', not X.Y", "=degrees). That's a pretty tiny dot. I guess then that since it was just the webcam with your ETX (125?) scope as the lens makes this a pretty cool capture then!

Seanie,

I hate doing this to you but it is indeed arc-secs! To add insult to injury, you may get it as a single pixel on your image and no more.

We have some mutual events coming up with Uranus' satellites and I am looking at a similar problem/challenge/issue since we have very dim and very small satellites at play.