Saturn & moons last night, excellent seeing (Wilco Kasteleijn)

Contains: Solar system body or event

Saturn & moons last night, excellent seeing

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Saturn & moons last night, excellent seeing

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

I recorded this image of Saturn last night (at around 0:15 UTC). For days the weather forecast predicted good conditions (low jetstream values) for the past 2 nights. The seeing was pretty bad from thursday to friday night. For last night they predicted slightly better jetstream values so it was worth another try. And this time it was a hit, a quiet atmosphere with excellent seeing, quite rare for Dutch standards.

This is my personal best recording of Saturn so far. Despite the low max. altitude of only 25 degrees above the horizon here in the Neterlands it is possible to get fine results during optimal conditions and using a dispersion corrector.

The below image is a composition of a seperately processed version where I cranked up the brightness so that the moons are clearly visible, with another version of the planet surface. On the top left there is Titan. Then right from the rings Dione and Tethys. In between those you should be able to see Enceladus if you look well. Then finally you can even see a glimps of Mimas if you turn up the brightness of your screen to the max. value.

In total I shot 143,000 frames alltogether within an interval of 40 minutes, of which I stacked 5%.

Post-processing: Pipp, AS!3, LuckyStackWorker & Gimp.
Setup: ES 16''/f4.5 Dobson, EQ volgplatform, 2x barlow, ADC, ASI462MC camera.

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Saturn & moons last night, excellent seeing

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