Saturn, Titan, Dione, Enceladas, Tethys & Rhea

[Dennis]

Hello,

The seeing wasn’t quite up to Barlowing or Powermating last night, so I had a go at Prime Focus with the DMK to chase down some moons of Saturn. Here is a composite of the moons and Saturn.

Titan 8.2m
Dione 10.2m
Enceladas 11.5m
Tethys 10.0m
Rhea 9.5m

Mewlon 180mm F12 at Prime Focus
DMK 21AF04.AS ccd camera
Composite of correctly exposed moon image and correctly exposed Saturn image.
Originals processed in Registax. Composite created in Corel Photopaint 12.

Cheers

Dennis

EDIT: Original source frames added for interest.

[DobDobDob (Ron)]

That's pretty special Dennis, I am simply in awe of this image, I don't care how technically good it is or isn't, purely from a visual experience, it's amazing. Thank you for sharing it with me.

[h0ughy (David)]

WOW, Dennis is THE MAN!! anyone can do a jupiter but this, this is something special

[John K]

That's a really nice image Dennis. As a visual object Saturn, it's rings and sattelite system are something special indeed. Thanks for sharing.

[RB (Andrew)]

Superb work once again Dennis and an image we don't commonly see posted.

[davidpretorius]

you are very very good at this.

what is the small shape to the left of titan?

top composition!

[iceman (Mike)]

Very nice Dennis, not something we see often in the attempt to get high res!

[Dennis]

Thanks for the nice words everyone, I was inspired to attempt this photo trickery when I saw Saturn and the moons through the WO 80mm – it looked stunning and I thought I would try to capture this wonderful celestial scene on ccd.

Dave – the small spot left of Titan is either a processing artefact, or sometimes I have noticed that the very smooth optics of the Mewlon reveal lovely diffraction rings and maybe Registax picked up a segment?

Mike – in this instance, hi-res was out of the question so I traversed the image scale all the way down to prime focus, although the native F12 focal ratio does help.

Cheers

Dennis

[middy]

Fantastic effort Dennis.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Nicely done Dennis. Great composition.

Ok Dennis, you have to come up here and show me how you did that. I tried the same thing the other night and there was no way I could blend the two exposures well enough to be worth posting. I used basically the same equipment with very similar results but photoshopping them together was the problem. I couldn't seem to get the layer mask to blend smoothlessly

[Ric]

Great work Dennis and a great presentation as well.

Top stuff

[Dennis]

Originally Posted by [1ponders]

Nicely done Dennis. Great composition.

Ok Dennis, you have to come up here and show me how you did that. I tried the same thing the other night and there was no way I could blend the two exposures well enough to be worth posting. I used basically the same equipment with very similar results but photoshopping them together was the problem. I couldn't seem to get the layer mask to blend smoothlessly

Hi Paul

In the burned out Saturn image that shows the moons, I drew a freehand mask around Saturn and then “grew” the mask and applied a rounded edge filter to soften the edges, growing it out as far as I could before coming too close to Dione and Enceladus.

I then saved the Mask and applied it to the correctly exposed Saturn image and created a new image of just Saturn plus the region contained in the Mask.

In a new blank image, I pasted the moons with Saturn cut out and the correctly exposed Saturn and by eye, adjusted the levels to blend the skies. If you stretch the combined image, you can see the results of this trickery.

One thing I have noticed with the Mewlon is that general light spillage is smaller than the C9.25. I think that there may be at least 2 factors here:

• Better optics so that more light goes into the central spot and 1st diffraction ring rather than bloats outwards like my SCT?
• The Mewlon has a 3 vaned spider and I think some of the light is channelled into these diffraction rings, making the central spot smaller?

I often find blending layers quite hit and miss. Also, the results can vary widely depending on what monitor you use to view them. I reckon I just got lucky this time!

Cheers

Dennis

[Zac Pujic]

Dennis

Great shot! Very three dimensional.

Zac