My first Saturn picture

pbholmes · My first Saturn picture

First clear night in ages, and my webcam adapter arrived yesterday!
With the webcam set up at prime focus (no webcam lens, no eyepiece, just using the telescope primary mirror to focus the image onto the sensor) the magnification is quite high, but even so, Saturn seems small.
With no tracking motor set up (I haven't got the hang of that yet), Saturn takes 30-odd seconds to cross the field of view, so that's how long a video clip I captured.

I loaded the resulting video clip into Registax and after an hour or two of playing, ended up with this.

It was still worth sending Cassini, though.

NightHawk

Great first photo of Saturn. I think I keep seeing Saturn from my scope.. but it is a star out of focus shaking.. lol. I'm always in a rush with my telescope to see anything, due to the cold.

With a barlow lense and eyepiece it must look stunning. Without this I can imagine it is tiny on smaller scopes I presume, and you have done a great job in capturing it.

I hope to achieve a similar photo from my first go. I was under the impression I could use my barlow and lense to assist me in astrophotography. Hopefully this is achievable. Sort of possible on the moon anyway!

From Bob's pics.. I certainly respect the chap for such detail after some of my miserable attempts by myself of the moon!:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/94057297@N00/

Please share your future photos Paul. I look forward to seeing what the bayers/west fifers can achieve. No matter the power of their scope.

Thanks Neil

bhenderson50

Good effort Paul, I would be really interested to see your video frames - maybe you could bring them to Monday's meeting [on a laptop perhaps]?
It gives you a great thrill to get your first astro-images!
Bob

Solar B

Nice one Paul
you can clearly see its the ringed planet.
brian

pbholmes

Hi Bob,

I'll bring the raw footage along tomorrow.
(I tried to post it on YouTube, but it says the limit is 100Mb, and the two files are have are 300-odd and 700-odd Meg. I don't know why they're so big - probably it means they're uncompressed.)

Paul.