My 1st decent Saturn image!!!

Hello,

Earlier this evening (Jan. 2, 2003), I took out my 8" f-10 LX200GPS in hopes of imaging Saturn with my new modified QuickCam VC. I have never been able to get a good image of Saturn before with previous cameras. Below is my result for tonight. It was taken at prime focus. I took a video at the maximum frame rate of my camera for aproximately 5 seconds resulting in a total of 145 frames. All 145 frames were aligned, stacked, and processed using a program called Registax. Pretty good results for a QuickCam VC! I would like to do better, but hey, I'm only 17! I think I have done well. Comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Taylor Chonis

Attached Image:

Taylor, Nice job and thanks for posting. Did you use the Logitech software to capture the video? If the software allows you to manually adjust the gain you can get alot more detail out of the image. If not you can also let the auto gain feature get more detail by making the prime focus image bigger. You might try a 2X barlow. I think you will be able to capture more detail. I am right behind you. I am waiting for a Mogg adaptor now and cant get my QCVC in far enough to focus now except with eyepiece projection. I want to do prime focus imaging and I dont have enough focuser in travel. I hope to have this resolved soon. How hard was the long exposure mods? If you do any timed exposures please post them. Thanks Dave

PS You might want to down load K3ccdtools. I hear that it will automatically sort your AVI file images so that you can stack only the best ones.

Clear Skies for me tonight. First time in a week.

Dave