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Saturn 2003/4/14, 397 video frames stacked |
Saturn 2003/4/12, 232 video frames stacked |
400 frames stacked |
47 frames stacked |
a raw frame |
2003/3/14 22:15 EST. Saturn imaged with Sony camcorder (hand held to the eyepiece), 8"/f6 Dob, 18mm eyepiece. From Green Tree, Pittsburgh. North at the top, west to the right. (left) 400 frames stacked with Registax. (center) Manually picked 47 good frames out of 800 frames, and processed with Astrostack (resample=2, deconvolution). (right) A raw frame.
Saturn moons, 0.5 second |
Saturn moons, 2 seconds |
Shown here are images of Saturn and its 4 brightest moons: Titan (8.4), Rhea (9.6), Tethys (10.2), and Dione (10.4). Saturn itself is greatly over-exposed. The left image is a stack (average) of 5 short exposures (0.5 second each); the right one is a stack of 2 longer exposures (2 seconds each). The telescope is an 8" Dob (therefore no tracking and star trails). A Nikon coolpix 995 camera is hooked to the eyepiece holder directly (no eyepiece used), and focuses on the telescope's focal plane (the 0.02m macro focus camera setting is used). F3.8, ISO 800. Images are stacked together with AstroStack software, and brightness / contrast adjusted manually. 2002/11/21 22:30 EST, Pittsburgh.
Moon hides Saturn |
The moon occults Saturn around 7:40pm EST 2001/11/30 here in Pittsburgh. Amazingly, overcast clouds here all day gave way to a deep blue sky barely 10 minutes before the occultation. I couldn't see Saturn with unaided eye -- it's too close to the bright full moon. But it's a dramatic view in an eyepiece: the moon was so much larger than the tiny poor Saturn. The above images were captured by a camcorder, hand-held to a 25mm eyepiece on an 8"/f6 dob.
So, here you are: the left image is one of the 12 best frames; the right one is the averaged image. Both images are 2x. A ring is the outer-most ring. Then there is the Cassini division, though not as crispy as seen visually. Then there is the brightest B ring. The inner C ring is also captured above, you can see the disk of Saturn shining through C ring. Some subtle yellow features are barely visible on Saturn's disk. Also notice the shadow of Saturn on the far side of the rings.
2000/12/3 Saturn |
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