Possibly 'Seeliger' ring brightening effect on Saturn

[geoflewis]

Saturns rings show noticible brightening at opposition, known as the Seeliger effect.  Unfortunately I was not able to image Saturn on 27th, the night of opposition, but I did capture it twice on 25th almost 24 hours apart, one just after midnight (UT) then just before midnight (UT) the following night. Here is a side by side of the processed images, with the 2nd one showing distinctly brighter rings (IMO).

Of course the difference may be due to better seeing on the 2nd night and/or slight differences in my processing of the data, but the effect is what I'd expect to see a day or 2 either side of opposition. I captured more data tonight so it will be interesting to see how that compares.

Regards, Geof

[Demonperformer]

The rings certainly appear to be brighter to me. But to me the warning sign is the colour on the outer ring immediately above the planet (on my screen). On the left one it is a pale green and on the right one it is a sort of beigey colour. If this is more than just my screen (which is always a possibility), that would suggest the differences may be due to something other than this effect.

That said, well done on tackling something different. They are both nice images.

[geoflewis]

3 hours ago, Demonperformer said:

The rings certainly appear to be brighter to me. But to me the warning sign is the colour on the outer ring immediately above the planet (on my screen). On the left one it is a pale green and on the right one it is a sort of beigey colour. If this is more than just my screen (which is always a possibility), that would suggest the differences may be due to something other than this effect.

That said, well done on tackling something different. They are both nice images.

Good catch, I hadn't spotted that, which is probably the result of a me applying a tad of colour saturation at different levels between the 2 images to try to enhance the colours on Saturn's globe. I know that I took the blue's and cyan's back down on both images as the general saturation turned the Cassini division blue, so maybe that is where the different colour cast was introduced. I'll watch out for that in future, thanks. Geof