Ok, maybe not my
first Saturn capture, but a single frame from a cellphone held up to the eyepiece probably shouldn't count.
Took a DSO break to try out a true planetary camera, capture software, processing, etc. Wow, is this a totally different branch of the hobby. It totally feels like starting over. I have massive respect for the imagers that take fantastic planetary images on a regular basis. I won't write up my capture and processing steps in detail because I really don't think they are reproducible and I'm just starting with planetary anyways. I know there are better ways.
I will note that an ADC really does wonders though. And my hack that saved me so much time was: hook up an APS-C camera at prime focus, NINA platesolve to the planet with Orbitals plugin, carefully unscrew the DSO camera and swap in 2X barlow with a planetary OSC camera, manually focus the scope to close focus, manually use an SCT Moonlite focuser to get brief clear frames as long as I could, and finally... just grab a ton of mostly ugly frames at high FPS.
Stacking and sharpening worked amazing wonders to me at least. I messed with AI tools but ended up ditching them and tweaked everything manually.
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