iceman
30-01-2008, 02:38 PM
Hi all
On the morning of the 27th January, I had some great seeing, supported by nice stable temperatures, and was able to capture Saturn and the Moon. Through the eyepiece before I began imaging, Saturn looked magnificent - very still and calm and I knew immediately the seeing was above average.
While processing the images, to my surprise I found a storm on Saturn and was able to confirm it with 2 later avi's showing the storms movement.
You can watch a 3-frame animation showing the movement of the storm, by viewing the following animated gif (150k gif). Some quality was lost in the conversion to gif.
Saturn + storm animation (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/downloads/20080127-saturn_anim.gif)
Saturn's moon Tethys was also visible while capturing, and could barely be tweaked out just above the black point after processing, but it only just covered a couple of pixels so it wasn't worth including. At mag 10 it was just too faint at the framerate I was using.
Captured with my 12" newt on EQ6, DMK21AU04 + 5x powermate. The attachment below is the best of the session, captured at 15fps for almost 4 minutes in each channel. I used 4 alignment points during Registax processing, and stacked 500-600 frames from each alignment point. Final post processing in Photoshop.
This is my best Saturn capture ever, and just goes to show that sometimes it's worth losing sleep when the sky is clear :) I was very tired but when the seeing is good, sleep is worth sacrificing :)
Saturn + storm animation (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/downloads/20080127-saturn_anim.gif)
Thanks for looking.
On the morning of the 27th January, I had some great seeing, supported by nice stable temperatures, and was able to capture Saturn and the Moon. Through the eyepiece before I began imaging, Saturn looked magnificent - very still and calm and I knew immediately the seeing was above average.
While processing the images, to my surprise I found a storm on Saturn and was able to confirm it with 2 later avi's showing the storms movement.
You can watch a 3-frame animation showing the movement of the storm, by viewing the following animated gif (150k gif). Some quality was lost in the conversion to gif.
Saturn + storm animation (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/downloads/20080127-saturn_anim.gif)
Saturn's moon Tethys was also visible while capturing, and could barely be tweaked out just above the black point after processing, but it only just covered a couple of pixels so it wasn't worth including. At mag 10 it was just too faint at the framerate I was using.
Captured with my 12" newt on EQ6, DMK21AU04 + 5x powermate. The attachment below is the best of the session, captured at 15fps for almost 4 minutes in each channel. I used 4 alignment points during Registax processing, and stacked 500-600 frames from each alignment point. Final post processing in Photoshop.
This is my best Saturn capture ever, and just goes to show that sometimes it's worth losing sleep when the sky is clear :) I was very tired but when the seeing is good, sleep is worth sacrificing :)
Saturn + storm animation (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/downloads/20080127-saturn_anim.gif)
Thanks for looking.