Saturday, March 21, 2009

A peek at Saturn last night

I missed a really good ISS pass last night at 7:30, due to clouds. Then again, if it was clear, it was so close to after sunset that I don't know where I would find a star to focus on anyway. I did watch it go over and could see it through the clouds fairly well.
Later, skies cleared up and despite lousy transparency, the sky was pretty stable for a change. Saturn looked very sharp, so I had to hook up my $30 Ebay webcam and try a few shots of it. I still have some processing to play with, but here is an early photo. I'm using the new Registax 5 that was just officially released yesterday. I'll have to read some tutorials so I can use it well and get some decent images.
This shot is with the rarely used 3x barlow. So this was taken at f/30. I forget how many frames are stacked, but I'll play with it some more to see if I can improve it some more.

More info:
Telescope - Meade 12" LX200
Camera - Vesta Pro
Frames/Sec - 10
Capture software - K3CCDTools
Stacked with - Registax 5 (just got the latest and need to learn more!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What model was the webcam?

Tom said...

It's a Vesta Pro webcam. I'll add more info on the photo.

Tom