I reprocessed an old image of mine, from 2014, recorded with a Scopium webcam, N150/750 on a motorized EQ3 mount.

Saturn, 2014-06-27

I decided to do something desperate given the low altitude of the ringed planet. To make the seeing worse, I also happen to have a huge part of the city right under the southern sky, from my vantage point. One more thing, the rather unusually cold weather made many people to fire up their heating, which runs on natural gas and means many little chimneys contributing to an even worse seeing. So I decided to combine 500k frames recorded over the course of an hour or so and select the best 2k frames. The raw material that entered PIPP combined mode was 36 GB of SER files with the ROI of the ASI camera set to 240×160 pixels. Then came a very long processing, taking segments of the image from different parts and stages of the process – so bordering on painting the image based on the real images.

So the gear used: ASI 224MC, TS Optics ADC, Barlow, N 250/1200, HEQ5 with a motorized focuser I hacked together. Location: Kolozsvár, Romania.

Software: SharpCap, PIPP (planet), AS!2 (surface), Registax and a photo editor.

(tovább…)

I reprocessed an image of Saturn, recorded in 2017. Looks like Saturn too was made with the N150/750, but for certain, my only color camera was the Scopium webcam, a rather modest piece.

I imaged Saturn with the ASI 224MC, TS Optics ADC, Barlow, N 250/1200, HEQ5 setup. 60k frames went into the planet (it doesn’t really get motion blur like Jupiter) and a few frames of 200ms into the satellites. Enceladus was at (or below) the noise limit, however, I added it onto the final picture. Below some more pictures with at around 10k frames each.

(tovább…)