Yesterday morning I was out again at 3am to capture Saturn, hoping to improve on my 18th December effort.
The 2 mornings were pretty much identical - clear skies, but bad transparency. Average seeing, about 5/10 if you squint hard.
But for about 5 minutes, the seeing hit a good patch and I was able to get a good red channel, a reasonable green and a usual poor blue channel to assemble the 5x powermate image, which is my best for the season so far.
The 3x barlow image was taken during the average seeing (at the start of the session), and looks almost identical to the 3x image captured the day before. The 5x powermate image however, is much better as it was captured during the patch of steady seeing which I would rate at about 7/10.
The poor transparency meant a high gain, and captured at 15fps (1/15s). Stretching the histogram during processing (to get a brighter image) resulted in a lot of grain coming out. I probably should've captured at 7.5fps (1/8s), but wanted more frames. Maybe I just need more aperture!?
Captured for 2 minutes on each colour channel. I captured Luminance, but didn't use it during the processing as it didn't help the image.
Anyway, happy with the large image - my best so far this season and hopefully I can build on that as it approaches opposition.
Thanks for looking, comments welcome.