I have a cheap fully manual Dörr Danubia f8/500mm lens that I bought back in 2012 for shooting the Venus transit. Since then I used it to take some Moon pictures also and when I am doing so I tend to use stars to find the correct focus – the smaller the star appears the better the focus.
In June I was out for shooting again. I mounted the lens, found some bright spot but despite all attempts I could not focus it into one point. I was wondering about what could I possibly do wrong until… no, that couldn’t be, could it? Could that spot not be a star at all?
A few pictures and corrections later I was astonished by the fact that I could capture a planet (other than our own, of course) with my DSLR and a cheap lens. Of course, the image quality was bad but, that spot was Saturn.
These pictures were taken directly from the camera, they are only cropped and stitched into one file. A few days later I spotted Saturn again:
And then I checked out Venus…
… and then Jupiter.
And I will not tell you what this is in the last picture:
Actually it is not just the Sun but Venus as well from the Venus transit on 6th June 2012.
All images above were just cropped but not scaled, therefore the size of the bodies can be compared to each other.
And since then I have a new hobby… :)