Saturn with Moons July 17

Taken with my 10"F14.6 Mak-Cass and QHY Cmos camera

Roland

Attached Image:

Nice!

Beautiful!

Superb resolution - just a stunning portrait. Much better than that Cassini probe's attempt at imaging Earth, a couple of days later!

I have looked at this picture a number of times lately, one of the best if not THE BEST of Saturn i have ever seen in all my years. my interest in astronomy begin in 1963. The picture has that PORTHOLE EFFECT.

Thank you all. I had a good night for this image. Since then the skies have been really disappointing. I think Saturn has now slipped past the point where anything great can be imaged, and I will probably begin getting up real early to image Jupiter.

I am not much of a planetary imager, my previous best image of Saturn was taken in January of 2004.

http://geogdata.csun.edu/~voltaire/roland/saturn1.html

I used an ordinary ST10 CCD camera for that shot, and it was not easy to combine the few images into a sharp highly detailed result. Since then amateurs have used thousands of frames from a video camera to capture much more detail than you can get from single CCD images. What also helps now is to use stacking programs that can slice and dice the wavering images and place all the pixels where they add to the final resolution. In the old days we could not do that, so we were limited to imaging only on the very steadiest days, which around here are few and far between.

I have also used the video technique now for imaging tight difficult double stars, and can easily separate 0.5 arc sec doubles with the 10" Mak-Cass. We can now record what the eye can see, and sometimes more. With single CCD images the best I can get is around 0.9 to 1 arc sec separations.

Rolando