Saturn July 2nd 2014

[Quark (Trevor)]

Hi All,
Imaged Saturn July 3rd in fair seeing, have attached 1 742nm IR, R & RGB data set along with their polar projections. This was the most productive session I have had for some time with 54 data sets captured and all of them put to good use. Over all I have 5 IR data sets at approx 20 min intervals, 5 R channel data sets at approx 20 min intervals and 4 RGB data sets at approx 20 min intervals.

My animations of these data sets are quite interesting so I have attached them to this message. Of particular interest;
In the 742nm IR animation if you look very closely just above the dark band immediately above the hex, in the adjacent thin light band, there is a dark spot. As this animation consists of all 5 IR data sets at approx 20 min intervals there is a significant amount of rotation captured in this animation. The spot is coming from over toward the following limb and moves past the CM. Initially it is difficult to pick out but it becomes quite apparent when you do find it.
I believe the same feature is also detectable in the R channel animation, it is certainly more difficult to see, somewhat more diffuse, but it is there.

Regards
Trevor

[Marko of Oz (Mark)]

Nice. Is that image scale native to your 16" dob or is there a barlow in there?

cheers

[Draco (Draco)]

nice. was wondering why your image was mirrored vertically to what I saw, then realised that my SCT flips left to right

[Shiraz (Ray)]

Fascinating work Trevor - that spot shows up quite well after looking at it for a while and it also appears to be associated with other structure in that zone. has anything similar shown up in past images from Cassini or Hubble? I had a bit of a look around - there are some small spots in this image, but not on the same scale as you show. http://storiesbywilliams.files.wordp...th_auroras.jpg

[Quark (Trevor)]

Originally Posted by Marko of Oz

Nice. Is that image scale native to your 16" dob or is there a barlow in there?

cheers

Thanks Mark, my imaging train is all screwed together as the one assembly starting with just the optical section of a modular Siebert barlow screwed into my filter wheel and with my camera screwed directly into the other side of my filter wheel. The current configuration delivers 3.7x with the ASI120MM due to the larger pixels in the ASI chip compared to my Flea3. The Flea3 required a similar setup but with a 5x Powermate to deliver the same plate scale. It's not a Dob.

Originally Posted by Draco

nice. was wondering why your image was mirrored vertically to what I saw, then realized that my SCT flips left to right

Thanks Draco. The BAA, ALPO & ALPO Japan require data that is submitted to them to be South up.

[Quark (Trevor)]

Originally Posted by Shiraz

Fascinating work Trevor - that spot shows up quite well after looking at it for a while and it also appears to be associated with other structure in that zone. has anything similar shown up in past images from Cassini or Hubble? I had a bit of a look around - there are some small spots in this image, but not on the same scale as you show. http://storiesbywilliams.files.wordp...th_auroras.jpg

Thanks Ray, several times this year I have imaged similar features at this latitude, just on the Southern edge of the dark collar of material immediately surrounding the hexagon. I have attached a very recent Cassini image from June 24th 2014 which shows some spots in that region, it also nicely resolves the anticyclone further to the South which I have been tracking since it formed in the turbulence behind the head of the Great Storm in Jan 2011. This year Phil Miles, Damian Peach and I have managed to image it. It is the longest lived feature of its type ever seen at Saturn. By the way, the Cassini image is in the red part of the spectrum.