I tried imaging saturn with my webcam last night.
Unfortunately, the night was a bit windy and the sky was a bit turbulent. Sirius could be see flickering from red to green like a set of Christmas lights, and as for the full moon...
Anyway, I took a few video clips and procesed them with Registax and Photoshop.
The first pic shown here is a bit grainy but just about shows the Encke division...anyone else able to see it or is it my imagination??


The second one is softened down a bit to make the image a bit smoother.


Hopefully I'll be able to get better pics with a clearer, steadier sky and Saturn closer to opposition.
Anyone else trying something similar??

Michael

Nice pics, Michael. What sort of scope and eyepiece did you use to take these images?

Thanks Paul. I used my LX90 (8" f/10) , a Celestron Ultima 2x Barlow and a Philips ToUcam Pro webcam. I removed the lens from the webcam and inserted it straight into the barlow using a 35mm film canister sellotaped on. I recorded a 1min video clip @ 5fps (300 frames) with a program called Vega and then processed it in Registax V2. Final touchups for the second image were done in Photoshop. I'm still very much learning my way through this so hopefully over time my images will get a bit better. One of the hardest things of the whole thing I find is trying to get the perfect focus - a tiny difference in the turn of the focus makes a big difference to the final resultant image. Apparently there is another program for recording video clips - K3CCD i think it's called - which is supposed to be better than Vega. Having trouble getting it to recognise the webcam at the moment - must sit down some day and figure it out.
Regards,
Michael

One of the hardest things of the whole thing I find is trying to get the perfect focus - a tiny difference in the turn of the focus makes a big difference to the final resultant image.

My scope is fairly shakey so focusing was impossible really! I got around it by buying a motor focuser and this helps a lot. www.jimsmobile.com/motofocus_data.htm

Cheers,
~Al

For those who are interested in observing Saturn, Sky and Telescope have posted an interesting article on it.
skyandtelescope.com/observing/objects/planets/article_304_1.asp
Well worth reading.
Michael

Michael,
Some nice shots there, encke division is definitely there, unless you drew it in using photoshop :wink:
Looking forward to getting a few shot of it in the coming months now that Mars is history, I finally got my webcam to work on mars but its nothing but a small red fuzzy blob with dark markings here and there, no real detail.

Hi,
I'm just on a break from watching Saturn for the last hour in between breaks in cloud. Clouds appear to be whizzing by which indicate very fast upper atmosphere wind speeds which isn't ideal.
For those with a reasonably good scope you should be able to see 5 moons as shown below.

Anyway, as some of you may remember there was an article in S&T some time ago about different colours appearing on Saturn's rings with one half appearing slightly red and the opposing side appearing blue.
Has anyone here noticed this?
I thought I saw it tonight but not sure if it is due to aberrations in the scope/eyepiece, my imagination or just due to the atmosphere. However, to me, the northern half of the rings appeared slightly red and the southern half slightly blue.
Anyone here noticed anything?? (Colour or lack thereof)
Michael