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sauron
12-06-2015, 05:47 PM
Hi,

here is an image of Saturn I took on the 10th of June from Adelaide. Seeing was excellent (for once :) ). It's only the second colour image I've ever taken so I was very pleased to atleast vaguely capture the hex-storm at the pole.

Telescope used was a 12" f/5 dobsonian and ASI120MM camera with Astonomik filters. Processing was with AS!2, Registax Wavlets and CS6.

bye for now,
Paul

Phoenix
13-06-2015, 09:49 PM
Nice one Paul - particularly given its only your second color capture. :thumbsup:

Cheers Steve

sauron
15-06-2015, 10:26 PM
Thanks Steve. Hopefully I can try some more
when the weather improves.

Eratosthenes
16-06-2015, 09:58 AM
Paul,

Can you elaborate on what sort of camera was used? Still snaps or movie frames? A dobsonian? Any tracking needed? Exposure times.

I am looking at investing in an astrophotographical set up and start from scratch. This is an impressive image of Saturn and I haven't included a dobsonian in my purchase options so far. Well done.

Cheers

Peter

sauron
17-06-2015, 01:07 PM
Hi Peter,

the image is created from an avi movie.

The camera is monochrome video camera - the ASI120MM (from ZWO optical). I also used a manual filter wheel (from ZWO) loaded with Astronomik RGB filters.

The telescope is a Skywatcher 12inch dobsonian on an autotracking mount. Because I'm taking videos, the tracking only has to be good enough to keep the planet on the chip - it doesn't matter if it moves around a bit as the stacking software will take care of aligning them afterwards. The tracking mount does this job adequately provided its aligned properly. In theory, I guess you could take the video without tracking but it would be very frustrating to keep the image on the chip ....


The reason I went down this road is that I already had the manual version of the scope and knew it to have good optics. So for around $1000 I could buy the goto-tracking upgrade. Ofcourse this type of mount would NOT be suitable for deep-sky photography though. Getting this sort of apeture mounted on an equatorial would have cost alot more.

As for image details: four runs were taken each through a different filter L + RGB. I took around 1600 frames for the L (lumionence) and around 700 each for RGB. I then stacked the best 50% frames from each in Autostakert and combined them into photoshop to produce final image.

This page:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/42079393@N05/8288781750/

was one of the people who convinced me that an autotraking dob can do good solar system work. I think the one used here is the 10" version.

I hope this helps,
bye for now,
Paul.

astronobob
17-06-2015, 07:46 PM
Great Image Paul, only your second - wow, thats fantastic i itself ! !