So, I decided to advance deeper into planetary territory and acquire a C11! I parted with my faithful Mak 180, it was really an exceptionally solid scope, but I felt the need for a bigger diameter and hi-res planetary imaging.
Of course, I was not familiar with this design and its collimation tricks. Clouds are omnipresent here so I had to learn the basics pretty fast. Plus my South is obstructed by tall trees and the planets are difficult to see, I had to move from my classic spot in the backyard. Change from solid and level terrace to the grass and oblique terrain...
I did the collimation on Polaris, on the second time I managed to see the extrafocal circles pretty clearly (turbulence was really severe for the first collimation ever). They looked concentric to me, but probably I set the bar very low
. You have to start somewhere I guess. Saturn is lower than Jupiter which means it navigates behind the trees for a while and I have pretty narrow window for focusing and shooting. The good part is that close to the meridian is above the trees (but something tells me that the air masses so close to the tree top are not too uniform and bad for seeing). The seeing was not good at all, but it had some better moments. I was really excited to be able to shoot Saturn at opposition and capture the Seeliger effect. I read a bit about it and found out about another mechanism for it, besides shadow hiding (which is pretty intuitive under direct Sun light). Coherent backscattering is also increasing the albedo because the combined reflections on all the tiny particles in the rings are producing a coherent light and amplify their brightness.
I kept 20% out of 23500 frames, 4 films, derotated in Winjupos. It was also the first time when I used Astrosurface, an exceptional piece of software. Hope you like it.
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