Borrowed a friends new ASI224MC OSC planetary camera the other day & was keen to try & image Saturn over this weekend with it.
Unfortunately the clouds didn't clear from Melbourne until Saturn had well crossed the CM which is bad for me because of trees & neighbors - so I had a go at the next best thing - NGC7009 the Saturn Nebula.
Attached is a 100% scale crop from the original frame of approx 800 x 3sec images taken through a C11 + 2x barlow at about 0.2"/pixel.
Looks like a sensitive little cam. A bit of amp glow mostly disappeared with dark frames & I was surprised by the result.
I'm blown away by the detail in that. Great to see targets like this. It's pretty rare for anyone to be imaging at 5600mm. Let alone with a small sensor too.
I'm guessing that the things that make it work include the very short subs that can snatch moments of good seeing, and the extreme brightness of the target. Did you use "lucky imaging" and throw out the not-so-good subs?
Great change of Saturnian tact there Maurice some great details revealed too, excellent...funnily enough although clear at the start of the evening here, which allowed me some visual observing of Saturn, I had passing cloud problems last night too so looking for something bright that would take short exposures I considered shooting the Saturn Neb myself...so now I don't have too, thanks
John: The camera should work OK for deep sky, but I've not taken any long exposures with it. The glow that creeps into the image is fairly significant and its probably there because of the cameras good IR sensitivity. I don't know how intrusive it would be on longer exposures though..
Mike & Trish: Yep, you are correct. I did try a 'lucky imaging' approach. Took a total of about 1200 frames and used about 800. Seems to have helped. It does indeed help having a bright 8.3 mag. planetary nebula to image, but f/20 is still a challenge..
Paul: Never!... although I believe that someone once said that its all dark really..
Mike: I reckon I'd still like to see a Saturn planetary nebula image from you... Can't say I've truly done it justice with the short integration time.
Excellent result Maurice! I explored this technique some years ago, but the lack of sensitivity of the camera I was using at the time gave mediocre results.
Clearly things have changed! ...and you've motivated me to revisit imaging these tiny yet often very beautiful planetaries.
Mike: I reckon I'd still like to see a Saturn planetary nebula image from you...
Yeah maybe, I only image at 1120mm FL but at an image scale of 0.83"/pix so on bright things like this and using essentially the lucky imaging technique, I can get reasonable details I guess but as you have shown using a Barlow would be the way to go.
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Can't say I've truly done it justice with the short integration time.
