Patiently waiting for bands of thin, high cloud to pass through, I managed to record a series of images of Saturn’s 9 major satellites last night, 29th April 2014, from our back yard in Brisbane using the C9.25, to see what the results would look like with no diffraction spikes from 2ndary mirror spider vanes.
I used a Celestron C9.25 SCT with a Takahashi x1.6 Extender giving an effective focal length of 3760mm at F16. Using a Canon 5D Mk III I took a 30 sec, 15 sec and 1 sec exposure at ISO6400 to record the 9 “easy” satellites of Saturn.
I then fitted a ZWO ASI120CM CCD Camera and recorded an AVI of Saturn with the exposure set to record the planetary disc.
After blending all these images in CS6, I produced a composite showing Saturn with the major 9 satellites and several field stars. The brightness relationship between the satellites has been subjected to a non-linear enhancement in order to display them in a single composite frame, as has the fainter stars.
The seeing was quite poor for the ASI120CM AVI, so the output was quite noisy.
Cheers
Dennis
Saturn:
Magnitude: 0.11, Size: 43"x 17"
Earth Distance: 8.9 AU
Diameter: 120536.0 km
Satellites:
Name Mag PA° Sep"
Mimas 13.0 272.9 28.7
Enceladus 11.8 241.9 23.5
Tethys 10.3 268.0 44.9
Dione 10.5 286.8 48.3
Rhea 9.8 27.0 32.8
Titan 8.5 288.2 152.5
Hyperion 14.4 120.5 144.2
Iapetus 11.2 307.7 316.2
Phoebe 16.6 121.4 352.6