Saturn from Sydney last night

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Folks,

First clear night for ages (when I've been free) so I'd setup before sunset and was raring to go, then after carefully aligning my mount the clouds rolled in.

Needless to say, a little patience and thread spotting here on IIS and the clouds disappeared and left a good few hours of clear, and much to my surprise some half decent seeing. SkippySky was forecasting 7/10.

Visually, Saturn looked very much like this, the shading in the planet's bands and the rings were quite pronounced, the Cassini division was very...erm...divided, and there were hints of the Encke gap.

AS!2 did a very good job IMO, and for once I prefer it to what I've managed to eek out from Registax. This was taken with a QHY5L-ii (osc) on the back of my C11HD/EQ6, and is a stack of 15% of 8000 frames.

Suggestions and improvements always welcomed!

Cheers,
Dunk

[MortonH]

Cool!

[astronobob (Bob)]

Looking good and natural Dunk, did use any barlow ?
I need to practice this planetary stuff, have the same camera, and am liking your result from it - good one

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks chaps!

I forgot to include my barlow in the list, but I was using a TV Powermate 2.5x.

Yeah Bob you should give it a go, it's all at the mercy of the seeing, but the camera does a nice job

[killswitch (Edison)]

Thats a neat sized Saturn, good result Dunk

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks Ed! It's still a little noisy, I'll have to remember to crank up the gain a bit more next time.

[kkara4 (Krishan)]

very nice Dunk .

[jakob]

Very nice, lots of details!
Well done

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks chaps! Jove is the bigger challenge at the moment, I think...

[oernulfs (Ørnulf)]

First: very nice images of Saturn (and Jupiter).

Here in Norway Saturn doesn't get higher than 11 degrees above the horizon, so not much to look forward to, saturnwise.....

A question about gain: is it so that increasing the gain reduces noise? Working with Jupiter with my dbk21 colorcam I use a gain setting between 720 and 800....

Any views on this

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks Ørnulf!

Yeah Saturn is the high one for us for now, Jupiter has been low the past few years but is climbing year on year.

Regarding gain, it depends on the characteristics of your camera...the way I understand it (which may well be off the mark) is that using higher gain risks introduce more thermal or amplification related noise.
The flip side is that if gain is not sufficiently high, the signal to noise ratio isn't sufficient enough to get optimal clean results.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the sweet spot is for this little camera, but I will experiment with this if the weather plays nice this winter. Essentially I'm taking as many frames as I can in the hope that the seeing is kind enough so I capture sufficient good frames to stack and thus do as much noise quashing as possible.

I guess the solution would be to have a low noise and sensitive sensor, preferably cooled...but I'm working with what I've got