The following are all my Saturn images for the 2022 imaging season.
August 14, 2022
I was able to image Saturn and several moons on the day of opposition this year. The moons and planet were captured in the same image, though I combined two layers, one in which I changed the gamma settings in the image to make the moons visible, then did a reverse mask on the moons so only the moons showed through from the image with the changed gamma settings to make them visible.
June 23, 2022
I imaged most of the visible planets on the morning of June 23rd. You can see all of them here: https://www.earthtospacescience.com/post/parade-of-planets
Below is my Saturn image from the 23rd of June.
June 14, 2022
Saturn is now high in the southern sky at sunrise, and so I pulled out my Celestron Evolution 8" EdgeHD setup. The camera was an ASI 385MC and I used a Televue 2.5x Powermate. Seeing was not great, as winds at the surface and aloft were rather strong, creating a fair bit of turbulence. So, I took 3 minutes of video with 7 ms shutter speeds, and then stacked the best 20% of frames in Autostakkert (after cropping down the video in PIPP). The resulting stack was then sharpened in Registax with Topaz Denoise used to remove the remaining noise. A few minor adjustments were made in Pixelmator. The final image came out a lot better than I expected since I couldn't even make out the Cassini Division visually, which is never a good sign when you are looking through an 8" telescope. Some of that may have just been the tube never being fully still because of the wind, and focusing with the planet constantly jiggling was tough as well. But, happy with this first image for 2022 and looking forward to the nights of good seeing we normally have here during the second half of the summer season.
Camera: ZWO ASI385MC with Televue 2.5x Powermate
Capture Area Size = 1280 * 720
Colour Format = RAW8
Debayer Preview = ON
Exposure = 10ms
Flip = None
Gain = 399
Hardware Bin = OFF
High Speed Mode = OFF
Mono Bin = OFF
Output Format = *.AVI
Raw Format = OFF
Temperature = 33.7 C
White Balance (B) = 95
White Balance (R) = 52
Total Frames Captured: 17,893
Capture Duration: ~180 seconds
Stacking: Stacked 20% of best frames in Autostakkert and used a 3x drizzle
Registax wavelet settings:
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