[Quark (Trevor)]

Hi Ray, very well put. I have often heard people remark that Saturn should be depicted as it appears in the eyepiece, I generally say to them, why would they want to aim so low. My 16" F4.5 Newt has a F/L of 1836mm but I image at a F/L of 9669.6mm.

With a state of the art CCD and high frame rates, the ability to stack many thousands of frames, thus improving the signal to noise ratio means that the detail that can be resolved now by amateurs is right up there, better than the professionals could produce 10 years ago. Birds Jupiter from Exmouth, in my opinion, is the best Jupiter image obtained from Earth.

The professionals are becoming ever more aware of the quality and resolution of amateur work and are actively seeking out amateurs to support their research. A very current example of this involves both Bird & I. We are supporting a research team from JPL, supplying possible target features along with drift charts created from our own data that accurately predict the positions of these features. The team will have Subaru on April 30th and then move over to the IRTF May 1st.

To show the detail that is of scientific interest means, on occasions, processing deeper than normally we would to just create an esthetically pleasing image. The researchers are not interested in any way with artifacts that may be created in the rings due to the level of processing applied to resolve the target detail or structure that they are interested in across the disk of the planet.

It takes me a lot of hours to process my data from a good session, all of it is sent to the various reseach groups I am involved with and my processing is always done with the view to hi-lighting the detail & structure I know they will be interested in. The same data is posted here on IIS, I simply dont have enough time to do another version of it.