Saturn nearing Opposition…
Seeing was half way decent last night..060917..after 1:00am I captured some close-ups of Saturn near Opposition
…a few more days to Opposition, but you can see the shadow of the Rings on the front of Saturn’s Cloud-tops,
…and also the Shadow of Saturn’s Disk laying across the rings directly behind the top of the disk giving it the “cat ears” look!
Diameter=18.28″
Magnitude=0.03
CMI=26.9° CMIII=289.0°
When Planetary imaging you have two basic options…shoot with a single shot color Camera, or Shoot with a monochrome(B&W) camera and use a Filter wheel with three primary colors Red, Green, & Blue to combine them later for a full color image. I happen to prefer the Monochrome & Filter wheel, simply because it is a little better at resolving the finer details, but it is more work than with a single shot color camera.
The Best steady seeing I’ve experienced in a while here in the Midwest, the More stable it is the more details I can pull out of the image, hopefully we get more steady nights like this.
Captured from my backyard observatory in Dayton with my C8 SCT Scope & QHY5IIL monochrome Cmos Camera & 2x Barlow, Astronomik RGB Filters, AS2, Registax6,RGB combined in Maxim DL, & CS2017. 3400 Avi frames with Firecapture.
Saturn Near opposition 06-09-2017
BTW Saturn is rising low in the Southeast after Dark. Don’t forget to look at Jupiter high in the South right at Dark too!
Best Regards,
John Chumack
