Contains:  Solar system body or event
Saturn 7 July 2021, Rod Kennedy

Saturn 7 July 2021

Saturn 7 July 2021, Rod Kennedy

Saturn 7 July 2021

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Very first planet capture of the season. The weather has been terrible and when clear the seeing has been very average. High cloud, early fog hampered the imaging.

Sad to see Saturn's rings closing (becoming more edge on) compared with the brilliant show a few years ago.

First time using RC10A for planets. I found the Astronomik RGB Type IIc set is sufficiently parfocal. The ASI183MM Pro is a wonderful for this type of work because of the image scale and relatively large sensor makes getting the planet on the sensor very easy using a finder scope. Of course you use a tight ROI and frames rates can be high. However, in this case Saturn has low surface brightness and so I was having to exposure for long enough to get some dynamic range. That defeats lucky sampling so I really need a night of good seeing to improve things.

I just took a sequence of 5min exposures with Red, Green and Blue. Within the 5 minutes only about a quarter of the frames were aligned and stacked.

Kudos to Torsten Edelmann whose FireCapture does the heavy lifting with the captures.

Profile=Saturn

Diameter=18.32"

Magnitude=0.31

CMI=52.2° CMIII=88.1°

FocalLength=4800mm (F/20)

Resolution=0.10"

Duration=300s

Comments

Revisions

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    Saturn 7 July 2021, Rod Kennedy
    Original
  • Saturn 7 July 2021, Rod Kennedy
    B

B

Description: Less aggressive processing.

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Saturn 7 July 2021, Rod Kennedy