[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

In the immortal words of Big Kev.. "I'm Excited!" (apologies for those youngsters who don't understand)

Last night/this morning was without doubt the best night of 2006 for me - between 3.30am and 5am everything fell into place and I grabbed about 65 gigabytes of saturn data to process in excellent seeing of maybe 9/10 or 9.5/10.

- Saturn was at transit (max altitude)
- 3.30am to 5am is the best seeing time around here
- Mirror was perfectly at ambient
- No wind, clear skies, low humidity so no fog or dew.

On live video, I could see the cassini division cleanly split all the way around, and many cloud bands on the planet.

It's going to take a couple of days to get a final image, but I couldn't resist processing one of the runs to get an early idea of the end result, and also to post here of course :-)

The highlight of this image is the Encke gap which just shows up around the outside edge of the A ring, this is the first time I feel like it is really visible and not an artifact.

Details:

13.1" f/5.5 newtonian @ f/33 (11000mm FL)
red/green: 3 minutes @ 20fps
blue: 3 minutes @ 12fps
PGR Dragonfly Express firewire mono camera
captured with Coriander/Linux, processed with ppmcentre,
registax, astra-image and The Gimp.

ps I'm looking at this image on a Dell flat panel screen, I don't know how it looks on CRT's or other displays :-)

cheers, Bird