Without AO, lucky imaging is a way of fighting the atmospheric turbulence

Besides being a professional astronomer, I also use small amateur telescopes to image planets in our solar systems. The following images were captured with an old Philips webcam using an amateur telescope (15 cm in diameter) with the equatorial telescope (manually tracking). To limit the influence of atmospheric turbulence, I used the lucky imaging technique and only combined the best 10%-80% of images, depending on the observing condition and the rotation of the planet. Even with such unprofessional equipment (from an amateur astronomer’s perspective), I still managed to capture three planets in our solar system.

Jupiter

Self-rotation of Jupiter

This gif consists of 4 images.

Saturn

It was taken in 2014 March.

Mars!

Other images I took with lucky imaging

Moon

M13

It was taken in 2014 Dec. with inverted color.