[iceman (Mike)]

Hi guys.

Had the scope out all night cooling, and when I got up at 3:15am the sky was clear (yay), the air was crisp and everything was wet. But 1 look through the eyepiece, and I could tell the seeing was very good.

Here's my results of the mornings effort. The 3 images are from 3 separate avi's, each of them processed in an almost identical way.

That is:
Virtual dub - save as individual bmp frames
ppmcentre - crop to 400x400 and centre the planet
Registax - stack, RGB align and wavelets
AstraImage - ME deconvolution
Photoshop - composite (no other processing)

The transparency wasn't great thanks to a very bright moon and a few high clouds coming and going, but it was better than last time and I could reduce the gain to about 50%.

I also captured these @ 5fps and 1/25s, meaning the white level went higher without increasing the gain.

The first image is 300 frames stacked, the other 2 are about 800-1000 frames stacked.

The last image, I reduced gain even more, but as a result each frame was quite dark and the histo stretch and processing introduced a few artifacts.

I'm happy with these images, I think they're probably my best of Saturn so far. The capture parameters are such a fine balancing act, but Seeing is king!

Comments welcome.