A quick Saturn on the 17th Dec

Garyh · #1 18-12-2008, 05:20 PM

Hi folks,
Great to see some clear skies again and have kept myself busy doing DSO`s..

Stayed up rather late on the 16th/17th and the seeing seemed a little better so I decided to run off a few videos of Saturn with the 8" and Toucam with the 5x powermate, This is from the very last avi when the sky was getting quiet blue and is a stack of the best 400 out of 2300 frames.
Very suprised how much the rings have closed up and how small Saturn still looks.
Happy with the first of many attempts to capture Saturn again..

Thanks for looking
CS Gary

iceman (Mike) · #2 18-12-2008, 05:44 PM

Good start to the Saturn season Gary! Nice colours.

Quark (Trevor) · #3 18-12-2008, 06:19 PM

Nice effort Gary,
You even have the Cassini division.

Regards
Trevor

Garyh · #4 19-12-2008, 08:18 AM

Thanks Mike and Trevor! Seeing could have been better but it was much better than what it has been like lately!

cookie8 (Vincent) · #5 19-12-2008, 01:34 PM

Very nice image Gary for 8" ! I recently tried saturn with 900nc using my 12"LB with ordinary result. Do you mind tell me what factors did you use?What is the number on your light meter? I mean shutter speed,frame rate, gain,gamma and so on... and how did you select the good frames?
Vincent

Garyh · #6 19-12-2008, 04:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cookie8

Very nice image Gary for 8" ! I recently tried saturn with 900nc using my 12"LB with ordinary result. Do you mind tell me what factors did you use?What is the number on your light meter? I mean shutter speed,frame rate, gain,gamma and so on... and how did you select the good frames?
Vincent

Hi vincent,
Shutter speed 1/25 sec, gain was a bit under halfway, captured at 10fps for 2300 frames, gamma was around the middle and brightness just under maximum.
Use Regisax 4 and I use classic and I find being rather faint you need 300-500 frames to smooth it out enough. So I use the slider on the bottom to limit the selection to what looks decent. Automatic prosessing is unchecked. I also use RGB align as well and hit the estimate button whivh usually does a good job. Then play with the wavelets..
Hope that info helps a little.

cheers Gary

cookie8 (Vincent) · #7 20-12-2008, 04:52 PM

Thanks for sharing your skill Gary. I think I will need to increase the number of frames stacked and the brightness as well.