At the Astrocats trade show in Hamilton this past weekend (2014 May 3-4), one of the guest speakers was the foremost amateur astrophotographer in the world today, Damien Peach.
His work both inspires me, terrifies me and often makes me very down about my skill level in astrophotography. But the only thing to do is keep working at it and get better!
Here is one example of his excellent work, an image of Jupiter from this past March 2014:
2014_03_13rgb05
The level of detail is fantastic, better than the Voyager spacecraft from the 20th century.

He spoke and presented via Skype from his home in Sussex? UK, somewhere on the south coast of the British Isles. The presentation was great and very inspiring, so we will continue to try and take better images.
Some of the notes that came out of the talk were:
He uses a Celestron 14″ telescope, several cameras but the two newest and most used are the ZWO ASI 120MM and the Point Grey Flea3 camera. Software includes autostakkert2 and registax v6.
The secret is to take as short of exposures as possible, to minimize atmospheric turbulence.
A collimated telescope and cooled mirror (to ambient) are also essential. Focus on the planetary disk and not a nearby star (and then move back to the planet). Take 1000’s of images. When processing throw out the worst.