Saturn on Boxing Day

Some beautiful clear skies and very patient out of town guest allowed me to observe saturn the day after Christmas and fiddle with this image most of yesterday and today. About 10 separate ToUcam streams were combined (25% of the frames were usable - 100 frames or so in each - seeing about 5-6/10). Some streams were aligned on the rings and others on the disk which when stacked allowed a hint of the encke division to be captured - though I wasn't able to see it visually.

A/P 10" mak/cass with Baader FFC (no IR blocking) yielding about f45.

I hope you enjoy it!
Alan

Attached Image:

Beautiful picture. The color is nice and natural. That is interesting that you align some pics with ring detail and others with the planet disk. I'll have to try aligning with ring detail and see what I get for results.

Clear skies,
Mark

Beautiful picture Alan!
You've captured great detail & color!

Happy New Year!


Ivan

Hi Alan,

Beautiful! Saturn , your processing 10 different AVI's
aligned on different parts of Saturn is interesting ,
I had thought of doing this on Jupiter when a Moon
transits along with the GRS and having at least two AVI's
and aligning one the MOON and the other on the GRS and then combine them.

Thanks,

Wes Higgins

Mark, Ivan, Wes, Rolando -

Thanks for your kind words.

This technique seems to have promise - especially for those of us up north. The seeing in Buffalo usually produces just a handful of frames that are sharp across both ansae, and even the best frames are not the same shape. The stacking averages these, but fine detail always suffers. Using several locations for alignment produces sharply focused regions, but then masking must be used in Photoshop to apply the focused areas to the image without softening other areas. But when it works, the extra time seems well spent!

clear skies to you,
Alan

That's a great image Alan.

Lots of really good detail, especially on the cloud bands.

Keep up the great work.

Derrick.

Alan,

Beautiful image! This raises an interesting question to
me: what is the true resolution of our telescopes? (by
resolution in this context I am referring to the width
of a dark line on a light background -- not to be confused
with the radius of the Airy disk which is relevant in
resolving binary stars) Has anyone so clearly resolved
the Enke division (as you have done) with an 8" scope?
I know that Theirry Legault has done so with his 12" SCT
and Wesley Higgins with his 14.5" starmaster (posted a
few days ago). In my image of a week ago (12/21/03),
the Enke division can be "seen" but I would not consider
it to be resolved.

Keep up the nice work!

Joe