Seeing wasn't good enough for mars, but by 3.30am it had improved for me to grab some saturn data. Still not a great night, the seeing got to about 6/10 max.
Anyway, here's my first saturn for the season... the colours don't line up properly but otherwise it's ok.
Very nice Saturn for 6/10 seeing. It's interesting to see the rings becoming edge on. I'd read somewhere that they would be completely edge on in 2009.
Beautiful image, Bird. A great starter to the season. Regarding the angle of the rings, the long term trend is that they are closing until edge-on in Sept 2009, but at the moment they are actually opening up slightly from our perspective until June. They were at a minimum of 6.6 degrees on 15 December, according to Sky and Telescope.
Graeme, I know what you mean about the rings... It was a surprise to me at the start of last year to see that the rings started off closed and were slowly opening through the season - I guess it's because our orbit is tilted slightly to saturns.
After June the rings will start to close, and I guess they will close more quickly than they opened...
After forgetting about that data for almost a year I was reminded of it just last week. I never did properly process it, the image on my website was done in a hurry on my laptop which is not good for processing work.
So to while away the windy/cloudy days I've been going back over the saturn data from 19th Jan 2007 at Lostock and giving it the full treatment.
Here's an interesting image - this is red channel only :-)
I'm still working on the green adn blue channels, got distracted yesterday adding multi-core support to the launcher I use for running ninox so it now runs 2 copies for this sort of work, much better on dual core machines.
Vivek, I used a TV 5x powermate + extension tubes so it was working at about 7x. The native fl of the scope is 1800mm so this ended up at a focal length of about 12.6m with a camera that has 7.4u pixels.
