Saturn and Titan

[kkara4]

Back on 28/7/15, had a decent night of seeing so decide to go for a little challenge. That was to image Saturn, but also to get Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea and Titan. Mimas in particular I knew would be a challenge with a QHY5L-II and EdgeHD 925 @ ~f/22. I also planned for 1 hour of collimation, which worked well.

Normally I try to bang out images the weekend after I take them. But this one I decided I would process carefully, and generally take my time with it after the seeing turned out to be decent. As it turned out the next 3 nights were also good, but not quite good enough to get Mimas through the noise.

Filters are IR (RG610), G and B. Saturn is presented in IR IR G B, Titan is IR G B, and Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione and Rhea are IR monochrome because they were too faint in G and B.

Composite assembled in PS after processing with Autostakkert, Registax, WinJUPOS for many hours.

Finally hit the combined limit of the EdgeHD 925, QHY5L-II and seeing, and im really happy with the result.

Enjoy!

[Somnium]

very impressive image good capture of all the moons

[Hans Tucker]

Now that truly is an impressive image :thumbsup:

Dumb question time...why no use of R and why two IR's for Saturn?

[Atmos]

Fantastic result there. I guess it is just another show of how "advanced" our eyes are. You can just look through the telescope and see them, takes hours of work and a night of excellent seeing to do to what we can do naturally :)

[kkara4]

Thanks Aidan, Hans and Colin! :)



Not a dumb question Hans!

After testing, I get a sharper result with the RG610 instead of R, and not much difference in terms of colour information when assembled with G and B. This is the same with Jupiter. This way you also get some IR information captured as well, and IR is less prone to atmospheric distortion than R.

The final image was LRGB, RG610 mapped to L, RG610 mapped to R. Hence the IR IR G B :).

[ZeroID]

Oh !
Stunning pic, probably one of the cleanest I've seen. Nice work !!

[kkara4]

Thanks Brent :)

[Camelopardalis]

That's a real beauty Krishan :thumbsup: well done mate!

[kkara4]

:thanx: Dunk

Sorry i couldnt come to Astrofest mate.

[astronobob]

Ripper, shows the mono cams are easily the way to go, brilliant image :thumbsup::thumbsup:

[kkara4]

Thanks Bob! Yes they are (in my opinion) although the ASI224 is a tempting proposition at the moment!