One ring to rule them all

Woohoo! It cleared up at about 1am last night so I got my first glimpse of this beautiful object. The gale force winds didn't stop me from trying out my newly modded B&W Toucam (chip replaced with ICX098BQ). Intended on getting shots using both the SCT and Refractor to compare contrast, but alas the clouds & rain hit with a vengeance about an hour later so these are just with the Meade & a 2x Celestron barlow.

About 300 frames stacked in each from 1800 or so.

Notice how much the rings have closed since last year? I guess this the next few months will be the last time for the next few years that we will get a good view of them.





Anyway, can't wait to try this with the refractor. I hate fiddling with collimation!


Trev

you got quite a bit of detail in those trevor. well done. Try using a barlow lens next time and youll get a much bigger image scale.

great stuff.

Trevor,

I'm with Carl, those are excellent. Nice sharp focus. I'd say for improvements sake, next time, try centering a little more and stack more images than that. Perhaps only dump the worst 30%

Your definitely on the right road to be competing with messrs peach, tyler et-al!!

Trevor,
Were these with the SCT, can you give us the scope specs?

Howdy,

It was a Meade 8" SCT on the ASGT. I just noticed tonight that I had the f6.3 reducer attached to it at the time :oops:

So basically f6.3 with the webcam which is equivalent to a 5mm focal length.

Tried again tonight but for some reason only one of my AVIs came out. They looked fine during capture. I must have messed up somewhere. But the result was a bit better as shown below. Still a long long way to go before getting to a Damian Peach standard though

This one is with the Megrez 90, NexImage & 5x TV Powermate.
Got about 600 frames stacked this time & used a 1.4 resample.



Trev

Hi Trev,
I was thinking the one with the 8 inch looked very small, especially with a 2x barlow on it, how does the chip compare in size to the toucam chip, is the new chip alot bigger.
With the 12" and a 3x barlow, saturn almost fills the entire field of view of the toucam, this gives me a focal length of 30 feet give'r take.