getting better...

I still have a long way to go, but my pictures of Jupiter are improving. Using the afocal method (manually holding the digital camera up to the telescope eyepiece) is far from ideal, but as you can see, it can capture some of the larger details of a planet. This image was a 1/25 second exposure with some minor post-processing brightening. I managed to escape any vignetting on this image, which is an optical effect similar to looking through a straw that results from using afocal imaging. At this point I'm more looking forward to imaging the moon because of the orders of magnitude more detail that can be captured. Right now the moon is 2 days past full so it's very bright and lacking in contrast, but I'll probably take a shot at it later tonight.