[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

I got back yesterday afternoon from a great time in Queensland, part holiday and part imaging fieldtrip :-)

The main target for the trip was saturn, which transits at a lowly 33 degrees from canberra, but from where we were staying in Rockhampton it reached 45 degrees - enough for me to have a go at it!

Leisa & I stayed on a farm called Henderson Park - I can thoroughly reccommend it to anyone that wants to experience frogs, echidnas, snakes, gekkos, birds, etc etc in the wild.

For most of the 2 weeks we were there, the skies were clear but the wind was blowing from the east. I found a couple of nights when the wind dropped, and one of these (17th April) was what I would call a "hubble night", when for the first time I really felt that I was at the limit of what my camera could resolve.

On Jupiter that night, not only were the small white storms in the polar region clearly defined, I could see details *inside* them, live on the laptop screen. That's a first for me...

So, onto some of the images. I'm still processing them up but here are three of the best (so far) from the bunch.

All images were taken with the following equipment:

10" f/6 newtonian, Primary by Mark Suchting of Berowra (Deep Sky Optics)
- 4x TV Powermate
- TruTek filter wheel
- Astronomik RGBI filters
- fire-i modded camera @ 25fps
- Losmandy G-11 mount
- Linux + coriander for capturing, Registax, Astra-Image, and the GIMP for processing, plus some custom s/ware for centering.

regards, Bird