Saturn Jan26UT fairly good seeing

[Shiraz]

Clouds at 4am, so went back to sleep. Woke again at 5 for no particular reason - looked outside and found cloud breaking up!! set up the mount and scope in a mad rush, hoping the mirror would cool enough by dawn. It just made it, but I did not have time to do a full collimation or to set up the dispersion corrector - just used laser collimation and accepted that there would be dispersion.

I got a couple of runs in through twilight and the seeing was relatively calm when the mirror settled down - waaay better than it has been for the past few weeks. It is a pity that I did not use the dispersion corrector, since a single broadband run showed Encke, but was otherwise spoiled by smearing. Regardless, am very glad to get a reasonable RGB result at last - still a bit soft, but good enough to show a little bit of structure in the rings and at least one spot on the boundary of the old storm region. Also interesting to see the limb of the planet adding to the brightness of the A ring and that the dark polar cap may just possibly have a lighter central region.

thanks for looking. regards Ray

[Larryp]

That's a great image, Ray. Lots of detail.

[Quark]

Really nice Ray a top result for the conditions and I think a couple of spots. I believe there are 3 or 4 of these spots at the moment. Damian imaged 2 spots that were relatively close together back in December from Cyprus. its worth checking it out either on his website or on ALPO Japan Saturn section. The UTC, L3 of the spot and wind speed for the Lat (to establish the drift rate) are used to establish if any particular spot is new or the recovery of an existing feature.

The computer models looked promising for this morning out here although I was on the Nth edge of it and the reality turned out to be very poor, hard to see the CD even in IR, so I didn't capture any data. Reckon it is worth getting up any clear morning just to check regardless of the predictions, which seem to have ever increasing levels of unreliability.

Well done.
Regards
Trevor

[Saturn%5]

A very nice shot Ray, look foward to seeing more great saturns this season.

[prokyon]

Very nice with great colors!

[Paul Haese]

Lovely image Ray. Great colour and detail.

[Shiraz]

thanks Laurie



thank Trevor. Will follow up and get back to posting stuff on the science oriented sites - but I haven't produced much of interest to anyone lately - that string of hot days really messed up seeing down this way. As you say, predictability has been rather absent lately. However, the higher altitude of Saturn is a real pleasure, even this early in the apparition



thanks Graeme - really looking forward to this apparition myself, should be some fine images from the southern hemisphere.



thanks Werner



thanks Paul. as you know, its all down to seeing and it's nice when that works out better than expected.

regards Ray