Hi guys.
As I said in a thread elsewhere, it was a beautiful clear calm early morning so Saturn was my target to try and get some value out of this darn ToUcam
It didn't take quite so long to get things on track this morning, i'm getting the hang of aligning it with the 2x barlow in, getting focus etc. I still don't like it, but it's not soooo frustrating anymore.
At the moment i'm not using the blueish IR filter I got with the ToUcam because, well, it makes things blue. I don't like it, i'm going to ring Matt and see if I can return it and look at buying one that doesn't make things blue.
Focusing with the hartman mask on one of the gemini twins is still a bit of a chore because i've got to try and get it done within the 10 seconds it's in the FOV, and every time I turn the focus knob the whole image (and OTA) shakes about. That moonlite focuser is looking really good right now
Seeing was pretty good, the raw videos showed the cassini division more often than not, though i'm still trying to come to terms with what settings to use and what type of stacked results the different settings produce.
I combined the short videos into a longer video so that I had on average, 500-800 frames to try and stack. I ended up playing around with registax most of the day today, trying to find the best settings to use, the best frame to select as the alignment, etc. Man it's a steep learning curve.
Even though the cassini division is visible in most of them, when too many frames were stacked, the seeing or wobbling affected the final stacked image and I ended up with a wobbly cassini division again, like I did in my earlier attempts a few weeks ago.
I found that if I was very selective about what frames to stack, and only stacked 8-10 in some instances, I was able to get a nice clear cassini division that didn't veer off at a right angle
But of course with so few frames, there's a lot of noise and not much banding on the planet.
Anyway here's a composite of the post-processing efforts today. The small b/w ones are at f/5, the next size up at f/10 (2x barlow) and the couple of bigger ones were done using 1.3x Mitchell resampling just for kicks. The ones with wobbly cassini's had ~100-200 frames stacked.
Appreciate your thoughts or suggestions or advice, and/or which one out of the below you like best
Thanks
![[1ponders]'s Avatar](../vbiis/customavatars/avatar45_9.gif){kind=avatar}
. Quick. Where is everything? Sorry Kids, Dads gotta go "
. I'll be back in a minute Luv
" 
And still get time to process it.:
How do you do it 
Keep up the good work
Paul nice work making use of the smilies 
sometimes you just have to make sacrifices 
Sometimes work has to take a backseat
. But now I'm on six weeks holidays 
