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.
The avi file obtained via pipp from merging the source files can be accessed, at least for a while (this storage is on a raspberry pi, not meant for eternity) here.
stack
sharpening
sharpening
sharpening
sharpening
almost done, a combination of what was nice and usable of the exaggerated frames
Saturn: final image, some further sharpening
The improvised balcony observatory
the improvised observatory, red LED light for style
motorized focuser, the duct tape makes sure there is no stress from the misalignment of the improvised parts
Saturn image, from September 2018
