Afocal Saturn

[paulF]

Hey everyone,
just thought of sharing my first afocal Saturn effort of the year 2011 :)
Seeing and transparency where around 6 out of 10 I believe.
I used my Kodak Z812 IS and a 10mm nagler with my 10inch Bintel Dob.
i took a movie consisting of 728 frames while camera held by hand so many frames where discarded manually. Resolution was 600*480 HD.

I used RAD video tools to convert the video to BMP frames, NINOX to center the planet in the middle of the frames and Registax for processing followed by some photoshop tweaking.

Below are the Photoshop tweaked image followed by the registax image.
Next effort, will include a 2.5 barlow but will wait on good seeing conditions and hopefully i would have upgraded my camera by then as the video quality is extremely poor.

Cheers

[Quark]

Hi Paul, the first image is nice and crisp and you have the Cassini Division nicely in it. A good effort for the equipment used. It is always a thrill to image Saturn and this is a good start for 2011, more image scale should be your next goal.

Regards
Trevor

[paulF]

Thanks Trevor and will do :)
PS: Love your work :thumbsup:

[iceman]

Well done for a first attempt! Nice work Paul!

[Clayton]

Nice try. Looks like you caught some of the storm as well.
Hope you don't mind me stretching the histo a bit?

[jjjnettie]

Awesome work there!
I bet you can't get the grin off your face.:D

[Matt Wastell]

Sweet! Saturn is great any time! Thanks!

[paulF]

Thanks for the kind comments guys :)

Hopefully, the next attempt will be better than this one as I will be investing in a better Camera. I want to push the afocal Technique further and work on my processing skills before getting into guiding and getting better Astrophotography equipment!

Cheers

[Quark]

Hi Paul,

I thought you might be interested in what others are producing with the afocal technique so have attached a link to an afocal Saturn that was recently posted on CN.

http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/4446080/page/1/view/collapsed/sb/5/o/all/fpart/1

Good luck with it.
Regards
Trevor

[astronobob]

Nice result for a 1st image Paul, good stuff.

[telecasterguru]

Super good image.

Frank

[paulF]

Thanks again everyone :)
@Trevor, i was researching what others are coming up with afocal and did see that one . Very impressive work indeed for afocal!
Attached is the latest processed image from a different video taken on the same night.
Will be shopping for a high end camera this weekend. Undecided in regards to getting an DSLR or a dedicated astro imaging camera yet though :)

Cheers