Saturn - Feb 17th 2007

[iceman]

Hi all

Here's an image of Saturn from last Saturday at Kulnura on the Central Coast of NSW, our local "dark site" hangout on new moon weekend. Only 30 minutes from home and only an hour from Sydney, but still far enough away to enjoy reasonably dark skies and great company.

It might be my last Saturn for this apparition, but it's my first captured with my new 12" newt on EQ6.

The seeing was barely above average, but the red channel was captured fairly well and was used as the luminance in this LRGB image.

I'm happy with the result, my first of Saturn with the new setup resulting in my best image of Saturn this apparition. Not too sure what happened to the rings in front of the planet, I think registax had some issues! When I've got some more time i'll go back and re-process.

Thanks for looking.

[Dennis]

Nice colouring on the disc with great band details. The edge of the disc and the rings look a little rough on my LCD monitor?

Cheers

Dennis

[iceman]

yeh I agree Dennis, a few too many artifacts. I'm not sure at which stage in the processing they were introduced. I do need to reprocess this image at some stage.

[sheeny]

Nice image Mike! I'd be happy to see Saturn with the naked eye ATM, so thanks for posting. Interesting effect how the outer rings almost dissolve into the planet body. I haven't noticed that on other images before... maybe I should look!:rolleyes::lol:

Al.

[iceman]

yeh I don't think that's quite normal. :D One day i'll fix this image.

[Phil]

fantastic shot you guys are taking some great shots on this forum.
Phil