I finally had the combination of clear skies and not being out of town for work. No matter that the moon was almost full, with Saturn transiting around 9pm this was a good opportunity to try some planetary imaging.

The seeing was not great. I tried a couple sets of shots with my C-11 f20 and f30 using a Philips ToUCam Pro. At f30, I had to have the gain very high so the image was grainy. I also think that the seeing was not good enough for F30.

Both are around 200 frames of 1700 or so frames taked with the webcam and stacked with Registax. For both images, I created a 50-frame stack and re-optimized with that enhanced stack (this is a standard Registax feature. I stacked to about 90-90% quality. I tried going for higher quality percentage, but at 95% I only had 50 frames and the end image was too grainy.

The attachment is the f20 image.

The f30 image is:
http://obsballona.net/coppermine/dis...ge.php?pos=-25

The f20 image is:
http://obsballona.net/coppermine/dis...ge.php?pos=-26

Comments welcomed.

--Andy
http://www.obsballona.org/

Attached Images

Saturn-f20-060313-04-st248.jpg (50.6 KB, 44 views)

Very nice! Very sharp, although as you say, a few more frames would be nice to smooth it out.

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Mike
. mikesalway.com.au - Astronomy and Photography by Mike Salway
. IceInSpace - The Australian Amateur Astronomy Community
. My Bio | My Jupiter 2007 Gallery | My Image Gallery

Thanks. I kept as many frames as I could, but the seeing just wasn't that good. Also, with the camera gain set so high (almost pegged) it just came out grainy.

The funny thing is that the AVI looks much grainier than it looked on the monitor when I was taking the image. I wonder if there is some bad setting on the encoder side....

You should be all set for the "spokes" in July. Good work.

That's a nice Saturn (Saturn is just so cool)...a little grainy, as you said, but very nice. I looked at your other images on your site. Nice work!

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Sunset

Die Sonne scheidet hinter dem Gebirge. In alle Täler steigt der Abend nieder
mit seinen Schatten, die voll Kühlung sind.

Very veru nice pics.

Hi, really very fine photo of saturn you have captured of the most beautiful planet in solar system.

sunil

Cool

Great shot of saturn

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

Hear hear!

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Of all the things I've ever lost, I miss my mind the most!

nice work. Great site you have. Keep them coming.

Thanks for all the kind comments!

Just need some more clear skies.

--Andy
http://www.obsballona.org/