Telescope Reviews: Saturn - March 20, 2009. Infrared-OSC

Another image of Saturn during some good seeing conditions (visually I could observe Saturn at 570x magnification without a problem! It looked fantastic. You could see several bands + colouration on the surface, and you could see 'through' the rings all the time. The rings were also clearly visible in front of the planet at all times. )

The b/w Toucam Pro II (840k) camera showed some unfamiliar noise problems; at 5 fps there were wavy lines visible throughout all the frames, at 10 fps the lines got 'smeared' away due to the compression of the camera kicking in at the higher frame rates. But something was definately wrong, and there is no doubt in my mind that the image could have been better (I really need to save up some cash for a mono DMK camera)

Anyways, the image still turned out very nice. This is probably because of the good seeing and high amount of frames I stacked for this image.

An infrared filter combined with the 840k camera was used to gather the luminance frames; 6000 in total, of which I stacked 3000. I couldn't detect any surface features in shorter recordings, so I ignored the planets rotation speed a bit, and simply stacked a larger amount of frames.

The trusty spc900nc (which is still working fine) was used to gather the colour data (combined with a uv/ir-blocking filter of course). The blue and red channels were not half as good as the green channel, but luckily that didn't really matter for the final image.

Registax v4 was used to stack the images, and Photoshop CS3 was used to combine the colour and luminance data, and neaten things up a bit.

The telescope I used is my Meade Startfinder EQ 10" F/4.5.