Saturn 11th of November 2023

[IDM]

I have had a pretty lean time with my planetary imaging and feel I have made little progress over the last couple of years. Despite this I really wanted to improve and in an attempt to improve things I bought a secondhand C11 scope on a fork mount. The first night out with the new scope it was clear that it was totally out of collimation and the Celestron mount was also not setup properly. So after a day of panic that I had bought something that was broken I managed to sort the mount out (PSU not powerful enough and GPS module turned off for some reason). I also watched a video on SCT collimation and 30 minute later things were looking up somewhat!

All the fiddling around left me very little time before Saturn drifted behind trees. So I managed to grab a couple of 2 minute videos with frame rate at 190 FPS. The best 10% of frames were stacked and sharpened with Registax.

 Whilst it’s not a great image it is vastly better than my previous attempts and hopefully I will be able to refine my methods over the coming weeks. Unfortunately by the time I had taken the Saturn videos, the clouds rolled in and Jupiter was not possible!! Hopefully the weather will improve soon!

Thanks for looking

Ian

[Space Cowboy]

Nice start Ian. You've got a terrific scope there! Autostakkert is much better than registax for stacking. Here is an excellent planetary imaging guide to read through showing each step and all the best software to use :

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/812022-planetary-imaging-faq-updated-january-2023/

 

[geoflewis]

That's a very nice start Ian. As Stuart says, Autostakkert is better for grading & stacking than Registax, though I still use Registax for colour balance and initial wavelets. Saturn is also still a challenging target from the UK, being so low down and you're a tad further north than me, so it will be even lower for you. Also it is now well past it's opposion so receding from Earth, getting smaller all the time, so much so that I've stopped imaging it. Jupiter is a much more accesible target and riding pretty high this year, even better next year, so hopefully you can get your scope pointed that was soon.