[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

Last night was a comedy of errors, but I eventually got everything working and had time for one imaging run on Saturn before sunrise...I shoulda set the alarm for 3.30am instead of 4am, I left myself with too much to do and not really enough time.

Anyway, here is Saturn from this morning. I'm using my Lumenera LU075M camera at the moment while the Dragonfly Express is away being looked at - either it died or I killed it, not sure which one yet, but I've got the LU camera going under Linux now so I'll be using that for the next few weeks until the DX comes back.

The LU has some nasty artifacts and lines at high gain, you can see it best in the blue image here but they're also present in the other images. Astra Image has some really nice lowpass filtering that can get rid of these sorts of things, so they've been filtered out of the final image.

Equipment: 10" f/6 newtonian @ f/48
Lumenera LU075M camera
red & green: 15fps (66ms) and maximum gain for 2 minutes each
blue: 7.5fps (140ms) and about 50% gain for 2 minutes

Filters: Astronomik RGB narrow bandpass

Edit: added a slightly better colour image

regards, Bird