first saturn

[josh]

Soory to do this to you all, but i just coulnt stop myself from submitting this first class shot. Dont feel to bad. If you all work at it you to can achieve such greatness.

Nickon coolpix,handheld 1/25 @ iso 200. Single shot.

Gaze in wonder
{be gentle}

[asimov]

Hi Josh, wish I could get as good a shot as that....

Pretty good for your first shot of Saturn! Now you just need a few more shots & stack 'em to get an even better shot.

Thanks for posting & keep them coming!

[cometcatcher]

Nothing wrong with that. What size scope and eyepiece etc?

[Dennis]

Hi Josh

That is a great image of Saturn for hand holding; and a single image at that. What 'scope and eyepiece did you take this through? I'm assuming that you cannot remove the lens from the Nikon, so this counts as eyepiece projection?

I remember trying this in the good old alchemical days of 35mm film, snapping a whole roll of 36 exposure to find one or two beauties nestled amongst the not so good shots.

Cheers

Dennis

[ving]

isnt it afocal dennis? i dont knoe these terms confuse me :)

look better than my first shot of said planet :)

[Chrissyo]

Nice first shot! :D

[Dennis]

Thanks Ving - you are correct. I suspect the imaging train was something like objective -> eyepiece -> camera lens -> sensor, making it afocal.

Eyepiece projection is minus the camera lens thus, objective -> eyepiece -> sensor.

If Josh is as excited as I was when I captured my first ever planetary image of Jupiter, he'll love sharing it with family and friends.

Cheers

Dennis

[davidpretorius]

Well done Josh,

banding on the planet and good focus on the area between the planet and the rings.

A bit more saturation may increase colour??? not sure

Have you got a barlow to get a slightly bigger image scale?

Also, has your camera got movie mode, so you can get say 10 images or more so you can start to stack them?

Well done!

[netwolf]

Excellent work Josh, better than my first attempt and with only one shot.

[jjjnettie]

You've managed to capture cloud banding and a hint of the Cassini Division. Well done. My first pic of Saturn was way bad, overexposed and out of focus.

[Robert_T]

Welcome to the Saturn fold Josh! Get a bracket on that camera and stack a few shots and you'll be spitting out masterpieces in no time :)


cheers,

[josh]

Hey all.
Sorry for not getting back, My net connection keeps stuffing up for days on end. New modem on the way.
Thanks for all the response.
I posted it as a joke at first {it looks pretty bad compared to the others around}but ive been looking again and i can see some detail there,could be worse.
It was taken through a 9mm plossl with the lx 90. The lense on the camera dosnt come off,it moves in and out when youre focusing.
Im still not sure what stacking can do. Do you mean if i had lots of picks of that quality and stacked them it would turn out clearer ?
Or do i need to pick clearer picks to stack?
Raining now, so im lurking around the net for awhile.
see ya all

[Dennis]

Hi Josh

I think we guessed it was a little "tongue in cheek", but we've all been there, at the beginning of the astrophotography pilgrimage. Hence, you’ll get lots of encouragement, friendly advice and constructive criticism from the IIS community.

When you stack several images, as the Philips ToUcam does by capturing movie bursts (avi’s) or the Meade LPI by stacking in camera, there are many advantages as follows:

You can select the best, sharpest frames and discard the blurry ones.
Real detail on the planet (=signal) is reinforced or “added up”.
Unwanted stuff (=noise) is generally random and so it is not added up and its negative side effects tend to reduce, the more images you stack.

This is know as improving the Signal to Noise (S/N) ratio.

You cannot take a poorly focused of blurry avi and convert it into a great image just by stacking, but a well focused and correctly exposed avi will reveal some quite amazing details when you use wonderful (free) programs such as Registax to process the avi. The authors of these programs are the real heroes when it comes to producing great images.

Cheers

Dennis