First light at Murrumbateman

[bird]

Now that the power is connected at our new house I slept over there last night with the scope to check out the seeing and try to get something on Saturn pre-dawn.

Lucky it was a warm night - the frame is up but the house is ot yet at lockup stage, meaning there are no walls!

Anyway, the seeing was extremely good for a few minutes through a gap in the cloud, so I grabbed a red-channel image of Saturn. Transparency was very low so I had to use 12.5fps.

Focal length: 12000mm (f/33)
Dragonfly Express firewire camera, Astronomik RGB filters
Red channel only (1000 frames)

cheers, Bird

[iceman]

Very nice image, anthony.. Looks like the new house will be a good spot for imaging.

I've also noticed how poor the transparency has been lately, and how much exposure is required on Saturn. It's a real challenge compared to Jupiter.

[bird]

Thanks Mike. Normally I can use around 25fps on Saturn, but this morning I was struggling to get half that - lots of haze around.

The seeing's been very poor where we're living at the moment (Wamboin), but it looks like Murrumbateman is better, it's about 50km away and clear of the hills.

cheers, Bird

[acropolite]

Nice Image bird, hope the house is coming along nicely.

[Dennis]

Gulp - 12 meters focal length. Sheesh, that would put the top end of the OTA in the stratosphere if it were a native fl! Lovely detail with such a large image scale; a testimony to the fine optics in this system, notwithstanding excellent operator skills.

Cheers

Dennis

[bird]

Yeah, 5x powermate with a filter wheel hanging off the end, making it work at about 6.5x. I had to measure my image size to figure it out :-)

ps no gama adjustments in this image, Saturn looks a bit bland in red channel only, but I didn't have enough time to grab G and B channels...

cheers, Bird