Aug 29, 2023 - Saturn Opposition

Capturing Saturn has always been a very challenging task for me, no matter how good the optics or technique or processing I always get results that I am not happy or satisfied with and this year's opposition was not different until I found some simple solution that fixed everything.

I am not trying to make it easy, planetary image is super difficult and frustrating, usually you will need a telescope with high focal length as well as some magnification barlow and camera that capture high frame rate and of course lots of storage.

My setup is a Celestron CPC1100 inch, 2x barlow, ADC (atmospheric dispersion corrector) in case of a color camera, ZWO ASI224MC and in this example I didn't use ADC because I used a filterwheel with ZWO RGB filters and ASI174MM camera. The telescope is perfectly collimated and polar aligned in order to get perfect tracking with minimal guide corrections.

As for the software, I've always used FireCapture to capture SER videos and I always use its buildin feature of AutoGuide which sends signals to the telescope to keep the planet in the FOV and AutoAlign to center the planet in the middle using some software algos and the last was the PROBLEM.

As for processing software, I mainly use AutoStakkert3 to stack the best frames from the captured video, and AstroSurfaceU4, PixInSight, Photoshop to get to the final image.

With that said, the problem that I was having with AutoAlign enabled which keeps the target in the center using image algos is the stacked image always shows extra rings or extra shadow that I can't get rid off in image processing

Once I switched it off and captured video again, the stacking software did a much better job getting all the details. Now the reason I use that in the first place is because it is much easier to focus as the live image is stable.

Hope this will help someone with similar problem and I hope you like the final image.