I managed to grab the 9 brighter moons of Saturn last night from our back garden in Brisbane with my Tak Mewlon 210 F11.5, Tak x1.6 Extender and ASI2600MM Pro camera.
To cater for the varying brightness levels, I grabbed a series of test exposures ranging from 01 sec to 30 secs and used the following data sets to generate the final composite image using Layers In PS CC to blend the 3 sets of images together.
05 secs x 30 frames 11:00pm to 11:04pm AEST (UT+10).
15 secs x 30 frames 11:11pm to 11:20pm AEST(UT+10).
02 secs x21 frames 11:28pm to 11:30pm AEST(UT+10).
The timing was critical as Mimas was moving away from the bright disc whereas Enceladus was gradually being swamped by the bright rings.
SkyTools 4 Imaging provides the following details for 11:15pm AEST (UT+10).
I had SkyTools 4 Imaging up and running at the time, to monitor Enceladus approaching the glare of Saturn and Mimas hauling itself out of the glare of the over exposed Saturn. This helped me plan for the optimum set of exposures and the best time to start the capture sequences.
I was lucky that the diffraction spikes from the secondary vanes of the Mewlon 210 did not obliterate the fainter moons.
Will add my 2 cents worth, also love your work Dennis. Nice project to capture all those moons, Phoebe at 16.6 mag is a great catch, even Hyperion and Mimas are not easy, especially from suburbia.
Will add my 2 cents worth, also love your work Dennis. Nice project to capture all those moons, Phoebe at 16.6 mag is a great catch, even Hyperion and Mimas are not easy, especially from suburbia.
Thanks Jeff, I went back to the data and in the 30 x 2 sec frames, after Aligning and Stacking in CCDStack (PixInsight spat the dummy - too few stars) a strong histogram stretch actually picked up Phoebe, not bad for 2 secs.
Hyperion was quite evident even in the Mewlon spider vane diffraction spike.
Although I feed sad for Phoebe, all the way out there on her lonesome....
Thanks Steve, although when I ran SkyTools 4 Imaging backwards, to Sept 9th, Phoebe was closer and Iapetus was on the outer. They must have highly eccentric orbits as viewed from Earth.
Maybe a stupid question but how do you compensate for the lack of brightness in the moons and the planet being excessively blown out to capture the moons?
I understand overexposing the planet to capture the light reflected off the moons and take separate frames of sufficiently exposed moons and correctly exposed planets.
I have images of both Saturn and Jupiter with moons included in their correct positions but requires excessive overexposure of the planets to capture the light of the moons in separate frames and when cut to paste the moons in with the correct exposure stack of the planets there always seems to be remnants of the light. Maybe its a "P.I.C.N.I.C." issue, problem in chair not in computer?
I don't do the cutting and pasting, I'm too blind and too stupid, my son does that in photoshop for me.
I don't share my images here, everyone would just laugh but I play with what I have and like my tiny specks of planets, mostly taken through a 152mm Skywatcher Achromat with my old Nikon D80. I haven't tried with the full frame camera yet, the little dots will only get smaller.
In saying that I was recently given an older firewire version of the ImagingSource colour camera by a very kind fellow member, which captures frames at 640x480 (and I've figured out how to shoot AVI instead of BMP images) and have an 8" Newt and ED 2 times Barlow and I'm keen to try for Jupiter if these bloody clouds EVER disappear. I recently used the camera for some lunar shots through my little 80mm Megrez (original semi APO (whatever that's supposed to mean)) only mounted on it's original travel tripod with severe wear in the head and I could only capture very small amounts of detail at a time so I'm guessing it will bring Jupiter up nicely on the 8" Newtonian with the ED Barlow.
I've been playing with this stuff since the 80s with 35mm film but never had the finances to buy great equipment but I'm happy and work with what I have. If I could get images 100th the quality of what I see here I'd be extremely happy.
Maybe a stupid question but how do you compensate for the lack of brightness in the moons and the planet being excessively blown out to capture the moons?
I understand overexposing the planet to capture the light reflected off the moons and take separate frames of sufficiently exposed moons and correctly exposed planets.
I have images of both Saturn and Jupiter with moons included in their correct positions but requires excessive overexposure of the planets to capture the light of the moons in separate frames and when cut to paste the moons in with the correct exposure stack of the planets there always seems to be remnants of the light. Maybe its a "P.I.C.N.I.C." issue, problem in chair not in computer?
I don't do the cutting and pasting, I'm too blind and too stupid, my son does that in photoshop for me.
I don't share my images here, everyone would just laugh but I play with what I have and like my tiny specks of planets, mostly taken through a 152mm Skywatcher Achromat with my old Nikon D80. I haven't tried with the full frame camera yet, the little dots will only get smaller.
In saying that I was recently given an older firewire version of the ImagingSource colour camera by a very kind fellow member, which captures frames at 640x480 (and I've figured out how to shoot AVI instead of BMP images) and have an 8" Newt and ED 2 times Barlow and I'm keen to try for Jupiter if these bloody clouds EVER disappear. I recently used the camera for some lunar shots through my little 80mm Megrez (original semi APO (whatever that's supposed to mean)) only mounted on it's original travel tripod with severe wear in the head and I could only capture very small amounts of detail at a time so I'm guessing it will bring Jupiter up nicely on the 8" Newtonian with the ED Barlow.
I've been playing with this stuff since the 80s with 35mm film but never had the finances to buy great equipment but I'm happy and work with what I have. If I could get images 100th the quality of what I see here I'd be extremely happy.
Hi Leo
A lot of this is experimentation with what you are seeing live on the Notebook screen via your capture program. I adjust the exposures for the various Moons of Saturn and observe the screen, just so that I can reliably see them, despite the overwhelming glare of Saturn. I then record that SER file.
This makes the brighter Moons look quite bloated and therefore distorts their relationship with Saturn's disc.
I did not attempt to make a pretty picture for this project, as it would have required way to much post processing.
I guess the easiest, but least fulfilling way, would be to ask one of the AI programs to generate a picture of Saturn and its fainter satellites.
