Saturn last night

Last night while testing a couple of 175 EDF refractor lenses in the observatory, I got some really nice views of Mars, the Moon and Saturn. Saturn was etched against the darkening sky evn though the seeing was not perfect. The scope just snapped in at focus, the way refractors tend to do.

So, I figured that this was a good time to try out my new Sony NEX-7 digital camera for lunar/planetary imaging. I shot Saturn in high definition video for about 2 hours until the seeing began to deteriorate. I used a 6mm Zeiss Abbe Ortho eyepiece in eyepiece projection mode to get something around 0.2 arc sec per pixel. Using Registax, I combined some 3800 individual frames (yes it took a long time), and here is the result. The image has been upscaled about 2x.

I just realized that Titan was close by, and found it on the original image by some agressive stretching. I layered it in to this image.

Rolando

Attached Image:

You are getting real good Roland

Respect!

Anthony.

Stunning image !

I got a "similar" visual impression in my 140 a few nights before this, and I was thinking at the time, I wish I had a 175 to look through !

I assume your selection of frames was from a shorter period? Just curious how many frames and how much ram it took for registax to load the raw stack. i thought there were some limitations there.

Thanks,

Totally awesome looks like a Hubble shot simply stunning. Thanks for posting.
Pete

Thank you all. I kept trying to answer the individual posts, but every time I got an error message that the site was down. Anyones lese have problems with Astromart?

Rolando

An incredible image thanks for sharing.
Mark

WOW! Just....WOW!

Roland, do you think the sony NEX-5 would do as good a job. Of course I would not have that wonderful refractor you use or that great sky, but I would be using on of your vintage 6" F8 refractors.