What Good Amateur Astronomers Can Accomplish

[Yazata]

Extraordinarily clear and sharp photo of the planet Jupiter, taken by Andrew McCarthy through an 11" telescope. (Reflector, I assume.)

https://twitter.com/AJamesMcCarthy/statu...4090900480

[Image: Fc4k_2oakAAlfu5?format=jpg&name=large]

[C C]

Pretty amazing compared to Galileo's view of Jupiter in 1610, which was surely blurry.

[Seattle]

Wow. I saw that Jupiter was high and bright in the sky today, didn't want to drag out my small refractor but grabbed a large pair of binoculars designed for viewing the night skies and looked at Jupiter and it's moons. Using the binoculars, with a steady hand, it's a disc with 4 points of light for the moons.

With my telescope it's a larger disc with one band around the middle and 4 slightly larger points of light for the moons. That picture that you've post was a time lapse of hundreds of images superimposed but still it's the best picture I've seen from an amateur telescope and image stacking software.

What Galileo saw was better than my binoculars (maybe) and worse than my small telescope.