8 hr time-lapse of Saturn's Moons

[acarleton (Aidan)]

Last night i set up my scope to take around 8 hours of images of Saturn and processed it into a 16 second time-lapse. The goal was to capture the orbit of some of the inner moons. The project was somewhat successful with Tethys, Dione, Enceladus, Rhea and to some extent Titan showing significant movement. It was also interesting to observe the movement of Saturn against the background stars.
The cloud started to roll in around 2:30 so i had to shut up shop a little early

Video is available on Youtube. Hope you all enjoy

http://youtu.be/jE4kq4X336M

details are:
F4 10" newt with 2X powermate
QHY5L-ii autoguider
Canon 600D
NEQ6

66 Images
9 seconds
ISO 800
Pause 400 seconds

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Very interesting Aidan. Not the easiest task by the looks of it.

[sheeny (Al)]

Very good.

Al.

[acarleton (Aidan)]

Originally Posted by rcheshire

Very interesting Aidan. Not the easiest task by the looks of it.

yeah, there is still some flex in my rig so it doesn't sit perfectly still in the FOV when i run a batch crop. i also had some cloud cover issues and it looked like my focus drifted over time. but i am pretty happy for a first go, some lessons learned for sure.

[Screech (Branko)]

Wow!

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

great work Aidan, awesome stuff.

[acarleton (Aidan)]

Originally Posted by rustigsmed

great work Aidan, awesome stuff.

Originally Posted by Screech

Wow!

Thanks guys

[Shiraz (Ray)]

great idea and well done

[LightningNZ (Cam)]

Cool!

[astronobob (Bob)]

Awesome stuff Aidan, never seen this done before, and has come up trumps in my books,,, a mighty fine show indeed

[RobF (Rob)]

Congrats Aidan! Top stuff - really enjoyed watching and must have been a lot of work.

[acarleton (Aidan)]

Thanks everyone. i was planning this for a couple of weeks and fully expected it to not work, but it went off very smoothly. i have a couple of lessons learned (don't go to bed without changing the battery for your camera being one) so i may give it another go. It is funny, i posted this on facebook and no one cared. it is good to find other people who are as amazed as i am at the fact that we can see this kind of orbital mechanics playing out.

[SkyViking (Rolf)]

Brilliant work, it's great to see those tiny moons go around!
I've often contemplated doing something similar, but of course never got around to it...

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

am wondering whether the moons would be visible during the twilight/dawn? get a few more hours onto the total timelapse ....

[acarleton (Aidan)]

The time-lapse stops because the battery died in the camera. i was going to switch it over when i did the meridian flip but i forgot. so it cut out at about 2:30. I don't think i would have gotten much more data though, the clouds rolled in about that time. if i did it again, i might be able to get another 2-3 hours. i couldn't start it any earlier, had to wait for dark enough skies to do a rough polar alignment and then flip over to Saturn. i got the session started at about 6:15.