During opposition, the rings of Saturn undergo a phenomenon known as the the Seeliger Effect, which is understood as the uncovering of shadows on the ring particles, resulting in a significant increase in the apparent brightness of the rings.

Usually, when looking at Saturn 🪐 , we see its brightest rings: the outer A ring, and inner B ring. With good seeing and a modest telescope, you can also see the separation between them known as the Cassini Division. In some cases, such as during opposition when the Seeliger Effect occurs, you may even be fortunate enough to see the faint C ring, located just inward of the B ring.

This image consists of 13x de-rotated frames of 1760/14090 subframes each, captured using RAW8 color space with 800x600 ROI, and 8.5030ms exposure at 300 gain. Sensor temperature was recorded as 23.6°C.

Each capture was centered, cropped, and limited to the best 25% of frames selected by quality using PIPP. Then the best half of the remaining data was debayered using AutoStakkert!3, and stacked individually for each capture set. Wavelets were then applied to each stack using RegiStax 6, and cropped in Photoshop to remove 2px from the border. For the resampled version, each stack was also resized by 200% using the Preserve Details 2.0 resample option with 5% noise reduction. These were done as a batch process in Photoshop using recorded Actions. The stacks were then de-rotated in WinJUPOS before final processing in Photoshop. Color values were balanced using levels, with saturation values bumped up a bit as well.

In addition to color data, IR data was collected using an Astronomik ProPlanet IR 642 BP (642-842nm band pass) filter. Captured using RAW8 color space with 800x600px ROI, and 3.624ms exposures at 400 gain. Which was incorporated in the reprocessed versions. Using 13x sets of 5636/28179 subframes de-rotated in WinJUPOS, the IR data was combined with RGB data as a luminance layer in Photoshop.

I found it surprisingly difficult to really improve the image by much when incorporating the IR data. As a luminance layer, the IR data ended up subduing the contrast between cloud bands, but also darkened the southern hemisphere. Which yielded a bluish-green color while also providing more contrast between the planet and its rings. Since the color data was already very good, the IR data was applied at 80% opacity as a luminance layer in attempt to strike a balance between the two sets of data.

The guider in this setup is mainly just used for polar alignment, but can also be helpful in target acquisition at long focal lengths. Uses the Player One UV/IR cut filter.