In the immortal words of Big Kev.. "I'm Excited!" (apologies for those youngsters who don't understand)
Last night/this morning was without doubt the best night of 2006 for me - between 3.30am and 5am everything fell into place and I grabbed about 65 gigabytes of saturn data to process in excellent seeing of maybe 9/10 or 9.5/10.
- Saturn was at transit (max altitude)
- 3.30am to 5am is the best seeing time around here
- Mirror was perfectly at ambient
- No wind, clear skies, low humidity so no fog or dew.
On live video, I could see the cassini division cleanly split all the way around, and many cloud bands on the planet.
It's going to take a couple of days to get a final image, but I couldn't resist processing one of the runs to get an early idea of the end result, and also to post here of course :-)
The highlight of this image is the Encke gap which just shows up around the outside edge of the A ring, this is the first time I feel like it is really visible and not an artifact.
Details:
13.1" f/5.5 newtonian @ f/33 (11000mm FL)
red/green: 3 minutes @ 20fps
blue: 3 minutes @ 12fps
PGR Dragonfly Express firewire mono camera
captured with Coriander/Linux, processed with ppmcentre,
registax, astra-image and The Gimp.
ps I'm looking at this image on a Dell flat panel screen, I don't know how it looks on CRT's or other displays :-)
But it's also a bit of a heartache. I set the alarm for 3-20am and when I got up there was cloud everywhere here in town. It was still cloudy around 7-ish.
And you reckon the seeing was great? Missed it again
Gee Anthony - that truly is a stunner. Looks fantastic on my 20" Benq LCD monitor. Easily the best Saturn I have seen this season. Nice write up too - sounds like you had a great session.
btw I saw the low cloud over canberra on the southern horizon. I have many not-so-fond memories of that. When we're in and living at the new place you're more than welcome to drag the scope out to our place to escape it. I suspect that murrumbateman gets a lot of 8 or 9/10 seeing nights due to the local climate :-)
Bird,that is a masterful Saturn and sets the bar for what the rest of us need to aim for this season. As Dennis points out that's about the clearest enke I've seen too. Well done
When we're in and living at the new place you're more than welcome to drag the scope out to our place to escape it. I suspect that murrumbateman gets a lot of 8 or 9/10 seeing nights due to the local climate :-)
I loved that Saturn picture. It makes me want to stay up and have a go at taking a picture myself. I don't think I could get an image as crisp as the one you have offered.
Do you get a detailled image by layering in Photoshop or is that how it comes out without using photo enhancement?
Uchtungbaby, the way to get good results is to use a video camera and record 2 or 3 minutes of video. I was running at 20fps so that means I get about 3600 "raw frames" of video (I do this 3 times, once each with filters for red, green and blue).
Then you run these videos though a program like registax that looks for correlations in image features across all the frames and you can get very good results.
Whats that...Pale vertical line dead centre running in a pole to pole direction from 90 S to abot 30 S, I can see that on my LCD...Anyone else or is just me.?
