Jupiter last night, Mars this morning

[Fumesucker]

11. You have a mount that derotates the Earth, you would call it tracking the stars

However unless your mount is very high quality and expensive (which mine decidedly isn't) the image still moves around and shifts some by the time you have the tiny dot of a planet magnified to the size you can see any detail.

The solution is to shoot a video which freezes individual moments of shifting blurry sight and then combine hundreds or thousands of blurry frames into a single sharp picture in the computer with mathematics. Looking out through our atmosphere is like trying to look a the bottom of a pool, unless the water is very still the picture is blurred and moments of stillness are infrequent and brief.

The best amateur telescopes today aren't really optically much better than the best fifty years ago (some of the antiques are prized for excellence), what's changed by light years is the sensors and most of all the processing of the images. Even Hubble images look fairly pathetic until they've been processed through a powerful computer system, you'd never guess what they were if someone showed them to you.

All the space images you see online and in magazines are not a direct representation of what the sensor picks up, there is a lot of art, science and judgement in making the beautiful images you see since the human eye will never witness them directly.