[iceman (Mike)]

Hi guys.

Saturn was placed only a few degrees from the bright waning moon this morning, so I wasn't sure how the images would turn out.

The bright moon, combined with a cold air with some moisture in it, meant the transparency was bad as seems to be par for the course lately. It meant gain had to be high, producing grainy frames.

I managed to get 2 decent runs, and produced 3 images seen below:

Image 1 (top left):
- 2700/5000 frames stacked (combined from a few avis)
- 10fps
- Higher gain
- Used the new ppmcentre program to upscale 3/2 and reorder the images
- Resized down to close to original size in photoshop

Image 2 (middle):
- 1400/5000 frames stacked (combined from a few avis)
- 10fps
- Higher gain
- Used the new ppmcentre program to crop and reorder the images

Image 3:
- 1100/3000 frames (single avi)
- 10fps
- Lower gain
- Used the new ppmcentre program to crop and reorder the images

Processing with so many frames (through virtual dub, then ppmcentre, then registax) took AGES, but I think it produces a better final result.

Used AstraImage on all 3 images, with ME deconvolution.

The higher gain images allow the crepe ring to be seen, at the expense of a grainier image. Also it seems the upsize/downsize process didn't help much, and the image looks a bit softer. The CD is probably a better representation (not overly sharpened and wide) but the globe looks a bit soft for my liking.

Anyway, comments welcome.