Planets

How to Photograph the Planets: Jupiter, Saturn and Mars From a Backyard

By Still DarkPublished Sep 11, 2026Updated Sep 11, 202614 min read

Light pollution doesn't matter for planets. You can photograph Jupiter and Saturn from a city balcony, and the technique that gets belts and rings out of a shaky telescope image was developed by amateurs with small scopes. The timing matters, though. An outer planet is worth the effort for a few months around opposition, and Mars for a few weeks every two years. This guide covers how to photograph planets in 2026–2027: when the oppositions are, the two kinds of planet photo, and what each level of equipment will show. With some equipment that's less than you'd hope, and with some it's more.

What opposition means, and why it's the date to plan around

An outer planet is at opposition when Earth passes between it and the Sun, so the planet sits opposite the Sun in our sky. Four things happen at the same time, and all of them help. The planet is at (or within a day of) its closest for the year, so its disc is largest. It's fully lit and brightest. It rises at sunset and sets at sunrise, so it's up all night. And it crosses the meridian, its highest point, around local midnight. The weeks either side are nearly as good, and since the planet transits four minutes earlier each night, six weeks later it's high by mid-evening, so you don't have to stay up as late.

Oppositions repeat at the planet's synodic period. For Jupiter that's about 399 days, so every 13 months and a month later each year. For Mars it's about 780 days, so every 26 months. For Saturn, Uranus and Neptune it's a few days over a year, so their oppositions come about two weeks later each year.

Planet opposition dates for 2026 and 2027

Jupiter's 2026 opposition has already happened. It was on 10 January 2026, and the next is 11 February 2027, because Jupiter's oppositions come about 13 months apart.

How to photograph planets: two kinds of picture

The first is the planet as a point. You use a wide or normal lens, put a landscape or the Moon in the frame, and shoot in twilight for the colour. Any camera will do, even a phone. The planet shows up as a bright star, which is what it looks like to the eye.

The second is the planet as a disc. This needs a telescope, a high-frame-rate camera, video, stacking and sharpening. The limit is image scale, because Jupiter at 44″ is only about 1/40 the width of the Moon.

Photographing a planet in a landscape

The best pictures of this kind are made in twilight, when the sky still has colour and the planet has only just become visible. Jupiter and Venus appear in civil twilight, Saturn and Mars in nautical twilight. A crescent Moon nearby makes a better composition. The Moon passes each planet about once a month, so there's usually a pairing coming up (our conjunction guide has the dates).

Focus by magnifying live view on the planet itself, which is the sharpest point in the sky. Shoot RAW, because twilight gradients show banding in JPEG first. With a phone, tap the planet to set focus and exposure, lock them, and use a small tripod and the timer.

Photographing the disc: lucky imaging through a telescope

The air is always moving. A long exposure averages seconds of turbulence into a blur. Video at 30–100 frames per second catches the moments when the air is steady, and stacking only those frames gives an image much sharper than any single frame. That's how to photograph planets as discs, and you can do it from a back garden.

1. Get the image scale right. Aim for a focal ratio of about 5× your camera's pixel size in microns (explained below). With a 6–8″ scope this usually means a 2× or 2.5× Barlow.
2. Focus on the planet's limb or a moon, and refocus as the tube cools, because the focus shifts.
3. Record video with a planetary camera or a mirrorless body in crop-video mode: 30–100 fps, histogram peaking at 60–70 %, moderate gain, SER or uncompressed AVI.
4. Keep clips short. Use 1–2 minutes for Jupiter, 3 at most, and 4–5 minutes for Mars and Saturn. Past that, Jupiter's rotation blurs fine detail.
5. Stack in AutoStakkert!, which grades every frame and keeps the best 10–30 %. Keep fewer in poor seeing and more in good seeing.
6. Sharpen with wavelets in RegiStax or AstroSurface. Stop before the limb gets a bright rim or the background fills with grain, then back off one more notch. Most people over-sharpen their first Jupiter.

Phone through an eyepiece. A smartphone clamped to a 10–25 mm eyepiece with an adapter can do all of this on Jupiter and Saturn. Lock focus and exposure, record 4K video for 60–90 s, then put the clip through the same stacking software. On a steady night it shows Jupiter's main belts and Saturn's rings.

Seeing, altitude and timing

"Seeing" is the steadiness of the air, and for planets it matters much more than transparency. A hazy, humid, windless night often has very good seeing. A very clear night behind a cold front usually has bad seeing, even though it looks perfect from indoors.

• Altitude above 30–40°. At 20° you look through nearly three times as much air as at the zenith, and atmospheric dispersion smears the planet into colour fringes. Waiting until the planet is high is the biggest improvement you can make from a backyard.
• Wait for the ground to cool. Roofs and paving release heat for an hour or two after dark, straight up your line of sight. Grass is better than concrete, and the hours before dawn are often the calmest.
• Cool the telescope. A scope carried out of a warm room is warmer than the night air, and the warm air inside it blurs the image. Set it out 30–60 minutes early.

Focal length, Barlows and the f/ratio rule

To show detail on a disc a few tens of arcseconds wide you need at least 1,000 mm of effective focal length, and usually 2,000–4,000 mm. A Barlow lens is the usual way to get there. It's a negative lens that multiplies the telescope's focal length by 2×, 2.5× or 3× without changing its aperture, so the focal ratio multiplies by the same factor.

To decide how much to multiply, use this rule: target focal ratio ≈ 5 × pixel size in microns. A camera with 3.75 µm pixels needs about f/19, and one with 2.9 µm pixels needs about f/15. On excellent nights you can go up to 7×. In average seeing 3–4× gives a brighter image with shorter exposures, and you don't lose any detail, because the air wouldn't have let you record it. An 8″ f/10 Schmidt–Cassegrain with a 2× Barlow sits at f/20 and 4,000 mm, right for 3.75 µm pixels, while a 6″ f/8 Newtonian needs a 2.5× for the same sampling.

Planet by planet: what to look for

Jupiter. Jupiter shows more detail than any other planet: two dark equatorial belts, finer belts and zones, festoons, and the Great Red Spot, an anticyclone about twice Earth's width that has been observed for more than 300 years. Jupiter spins once in under ten hours (9 h 56 min at the poles, 9 h 50 min at the equator), so the Spot faces Earth only about half the time and you can see features move in minutes. That rotation is why clips are limited to two or three minutes. Any binoculars show the four Galilean moons, and their positions change every night.

Saturn. The rings crossed edge-on in March 2025 and are reopening slowly. The tilt is about 7° at the October 2026 opposition and about 12° at the October 2027 one, and it widens to its near-maximum of 27° by 2032. Narrow rings have some advantages. The globe's shadow on the rings and the ring shadow on the globe stand out, and the moons are easier to see without the glare. The Cassini Division needs a steady night and at least 4″ of aperture.

Mars. Mars shows a disc with detail for two or three months around each opposition. The rest of the time it's a featureless orange point 4–6″ across. The 19 February 2027 opposition is an aphelic one, with Mars near the far end of its orbit, so the disc is only 13.8″ across at magnitude −1.2. It is high in the sky for northern observers, which helps. Look for the north polar cap and dark markings such as Syrtis Major.

Uranus and Neptune. Both are discs, 3.8″ and 2.4″, and a 6–8″ scope at high power shows them as small pale-green and blue-grey balls with no detail. That's all there is to photograph. Uranus at magnitude 5.6 can be seen with the naked eye from a dark site, and Neptune at 7.8 needs binoculars.

Mercury. Mercury is never far from the Sun, so it's a hard twilight subject for a landscape photo. It's best at greatest elongation, when it's 18–28° from the Sun and visible for under an hour after sunset or before dawn. As a disc it's always low and in poor seeing. Check Sky Events → Elongations for the next apparition.

Gear tiers: what each telescope will show

More aperture only gives more resolution when the air is steady. On an average night a well-collimated 6″ shows as much as the seeing allows, and a 12″ only does better on the rare steady night. Check a reflector's collimation on a star before every session, even though it's tedious. It makes a big difference to sharpness.

Common mistakes

• Shooting the planet low because it's convenient at 9 p.m. Wait, or come back after midnight in the weeks before opposition.
• Single still frames of the disc. Above 1,000 mm you need video and stacking.
• Over-long clips on Jupiter. Three minutes is the limit unless you use derotation software.
• Over-sharpening. A bright rim on the limb and "onion rings" in the belts mean the wavelets went too far.
• Too much focal length in poor seeing. Take the Barlow off when the planet's image is shimmering badly.
• Expecting Mars to look good in 2026. It won't look good until early 2027.

FAQ

Sources and further reading

• In-The-Sky.org — Mars at opposition, 19 February 2027 (0.68 AU, 13.8″, magnitude −1.2; companion pages give Saturn, Uranus and Neptune's 2026–27 distance, diameter and ring tilt).
• EarthSky — Jupiter at opposition (11 Feb 2027 at 0:21 UTC, magnitude −2.5, Leo, the 13-month cycle).
• In-The-Sky.org — Saturn at opposition, 4 October 2026 (8.43 AU, 19.7″, magnitude 0.3, rings at 7°).
• NASA Science — Jupiter facts (a 9.9-hour day, the Great Red Spot twice Earth's width and observed for 300+ years, the Galilean moons).
• Jerry Lodriguss, Astropix — High-Resolution Planetary Imaging (the 3×–7× pixel-size focal-ratio rule, clip lengths per planet, stacking the best frames, why altitude matters).
• Sea and Sky — Astronomy Calendar of Celestial Events 2027 (opposition and Mercury elongation dates for 2027).