Posts Made By: Roland Christen

Nice catch!

Rolando

Just for funsies, a double size image

Rolando

It certainly is stunning!

Rolando

Very nice!

Rolando

Excellent!

Rolando

Awesome!

Rolando

And the Plato region of the Moon, 278 frames, stacked in Registax6

Rolando

Looks more like a Koala bear to me 8O

Rolando

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

Now that is a stunning image. Congrats!

Rolando