Saturn 2003/4/14, 397 video frames stacked

2003/4/14 21:00 EDT. Another night with steady seeing. 8"/f6 Dob + 9mm eyepiece + handheld sony camcorder. 397 frames stacked with registax.

Saturn 2003/4/12, 232 video frames stacked

2003/4/12 21:00 EDT. 8"/f6 Dob + 9mm eyepiece + handheld sony camcorder. 232 frames stacked with registax.

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.

The above image of Saturn was taken at 22:45 EST, 11/6/2001 from Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. The sky was clear and seeing stable. The telescope is an 8"/f6 dob. With 9mm eyepiece I could easily see the Cassini division, and the rings had a yellow-brown color (much more vivid than shown above). Then I held a sony camcorder to the eyepiece and took 10 seconds of video in afocal mode. After digitizing the video with a D-link image capture card, I hand-picked 12 best frames and averaged them with Astrostack software, using 'unsharp mask 3'.

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

The Cassini division is obvious in this image. Taken with the camcorder 'night vision' option. The time was EDT.

The first time I saw the Cassini division. Not very clear in this image, it is the thin dark line separating the ring into two (actually the ring has many more parts, but that's invisible here). The division was discovered by Giovanni Cassinni in 1675. Celestron 8" Dob + 10mm Plossl eyepiece + Camcorder. The time was EDT.

Questar + Camcorder. 1999/9/19 23:55 EDT.