An unusual view of Saturn, 5th May 2013

[lukebl]

Hi all,

My first proper attempt at Saturn this season. As others have noted, the low elevation and bad seeing haven't helped at all. IMG132e, 3000 frames, 3x televue Barlow, 250mm f/4.7 Newtonian.

These cams aren't designed for long exposures, but just for fun I thought I'd see what moons I could capture with a series of 3 second exposures. Here's the result, 50 x 3s and managed to capture 13th mag Mimas and 12th mag. Enceladus. Obviously the planet was hopelessly overexposed, so I inserted the above image and put the layer state to 'difference', and got this rather interesting effect. Not high-res stuff, but a bit of fun.

[JamesF]

Very nice first image, and fun to see the moons in the second

James

[rwilkey]

Luke, that's brilliant, nice to capture all the near moons!

[stonemonkeylives]

Great images, especially the one with the moons. I even like the way Saturn looks, remember ends me of a Cassini image where the Sun was directly behind Saturn.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

[ixs74]

Great idea ! Is it possible to capture its moons not overexposed with a decent scope ?

[Ewan]

Great shots there & the over exposure 'trick' worked well

[lukebl]

Thanks a lot, guys!

Great idea ! Is it possible to capture its moons not overexposed with a decent scope ?

No. You can't avoid overexposing such a bright object when imaging a faint one nearby. Here's a capture I did a while back of Himailia, one of Jupiter's fainter moons. As you see, Jupiter itself is a tiny bit over-exposed! As are Callisto and Ganymede, the bright objects nearly lost in the glare to lower left and upper right. All the other objects are just stars.

[Alan]

Interesting stuff Luke. A timely reminder that Saturn has moons as well !

[Space Cowboy]

Very interesting and detailed images Luke! That camera is performing well. 3x tv barlow is just what I need with these cmos chips.

[Atlas]

A little trick. Take an image of the moons and an over exposed planet, then take another with a normal exposure planet and just stack them (cut and paste). It's not a foul in planetary imaging and creates some nice full picture images.