Saturn 27th April 2012

[allan gould]

Conditions improved a little (but not that much) in Brisbane and as the moon was blazing away I thought I would attempt an image of Saturn.
I had to wait almost until transit time before the seeing improved and managed a 2min avi of 10,000 frames with the ASI120MM camera and a ROI of 480x320. Other details below.
[ASI120MM Camera (ZWO Design)]
Frame Divisor=1
Resolution=480x320
Frame Rate (fps)=Maximum
Colour Space / Compression=MONO8
Pan=0
Tilt=0
Exposure (s)=0.011667
Brightness=7
Gamma=24
Gain=72

25% of frames processed in Autostakkert

[peter_4059]

Nice and sharp Allan. What f/l did you use?

[allan gould]

Sorry Peter, I used a 2x barlow and Fl should have been about 5000mm. Ive attached a polar projection and maybe with the eye of faith you can see the polar hexagon.
Allan

[Quark]

Well done Alan, nice & crisp yet not over sharpened.

Cheers
Trevor

[allan gould]

Thanks Trevor, just wish I had your seeing.
Allan

[Larryp]

Nice work, Allan:thumbsup:

[jjjnettie]

Super nice work :)

[EricB]

Great job Allan!

Looking at your capture, I am thinking that you get much more frames that I do (which is between 1000 and 2000), and your gain, in this particular instance is much higher that the levels I would usually have (which is around 30ish). I'll have to get more capture time next time I image Jupiter. Any idea what the actual frame rate was?

Cheers,

Eric

[Dennis]

That is a cracker of a Saturn image Allan; you’re really doing some excellent work with the ASI.:)

Thanks for the capture details too.:thumbsup:
Cheers

Dennis

[allan gould]

Thanks Larry, your comments are appreciated

getting there JJJ, need more practice but definitely better seeing.

thanks for the comments Eric. From memory my last set of images were at about 100fps or just under at 98fps. I think I use a higher gain than most and have gone to 90 to get fast fps but have taken it down to 24 but I then find that the fps drop to about 15fps. I tend not to do any processing on the image in Registx or PS as in find that sharpening therein really brings artifacts? Or heavy contrasts to the image. I just let Autostakkert do it's thing and I'm happy with that. I still have to balance the number of alignment points etc with the number of frames to stack. A lot to learn.

thanks for the kind comments Dennis as I'm still waiting for that one night of great seeing in Brisbane. When it comes about then I will be ecstatic.
Allan