Saturn March 16. Encke division and multispectral

[Zac Pujic]

I had some good seeing last friday. Here is Saturn in colour, UV and methane bands. The colour image shows the Encke division (also called Keeler division) in the outermost part of the A ring. The C ring (crepe ring) is also visible between the planet and the bright B ring. The planet is visible shining through the C ring.

The UV and methane band images are interesting because they show almost complementary views. The UV image shows a UV-dark belt between -42 and -52 degrees south, as well as a dark equatorial region. The methane image shows a methane-dark belt between -18 and -33 degrees south, and a bright equatorial region. In general, features dark in UV are bright in the methane image.

http://astroimg.org/Saturn2007/20070316_1134.jpg

Zac Pujic
Brisbane, Australia
http://astroimg.org

[Dennis]

Wow - that's awesome, Zac!

Cheers

Dennis

[iceman (Mike)]

Great image, one of the best I've seen from Australia this apparition.

How long did you record the Lum channel for?

[Ric]

That's a ripper Zac, the image is very well defined. The methane is very interesting as well.

Great stuff

[RB (Andrew)]

Wow, an awesome shot Zac.

[Lester]

Yep, absolutely awesome, Zac. The best I have seen.

Well done.

[davidpretorius]

zac, you are on serious fire!!!!

i am so glad that your skills have been able to come to the fore with an extended batch of great seeing......congrats!

[Zac Pujic]

thanks everyone, Mike,

I always record for 130 seconds to prevent rotational blurring. I get tempted to take longer images for Saturn since it has so few spots, but then I stop myself because although taking longer recordings would give a cleaner image, it would remove the possibility of recording fine detail. I'd rather have a slightly noisy image with real data, than a smooth image with no cloud detail.
That night was definately exceptional. I'm still processing the Jupiter images.

Zac

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks Zac, I look forward to seeing the Jupiter images!

[tornado33]

Well done.
Scott