Mars is on the wane while Saturn is on the rise, images

thanks lads,
I was going to do some galaxies, but I was too tired and just felt like doing some "easy" imaging. I need to step up a few gears mentally to do deep sky and at 1am on a monday morning, its just not going to happen :lol:
The 2 images are to scale, these are the relative sizes of the 2 planets, I was hoping to get Venus earlier but the nearby roofs just block it out for me, and if I had enough caffine in the house I was thinking of staying up to get Jupiter.

If you look closely you can just make out the "C" ring, I didnt notice this at first but its there, the dust artifacts are visible as irregularities in certain parts of the cassini disivion, see if you can find them, I did what I could do to minimise them.

The funny thing about the saturn image is that I captuered it at 30 frames per second to try and freeze out the "seeing", it seemded to have worked to some extent but this made the image very dark so it was quite grainy, so I had to scale down the entire frame size to compress the noise out which is a real pity, this image below it straight out of registax and shows the defects and noise more clearly.
I think I need a more sensitive planetary camera !


www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/fi...saturn_19-12-2b1.jpg

I'm sure with more time, a better image then the one in the first post could be derived from this one.
I've also spent the evening cleaning all my lenses/barlows and webcam ccd detectors :lol:

Yeh - I see the motes now. But they're not terribly noticeable.

I like the rather natural looking colour and the shadow of the planet on the rings (lower right). It really gives a good 3-d perspective.

How's about the LPI or the Celestron equivalent? I'm not sure how they compare to a webcam though...

Galaxies - I hammered five out in less than 30 mins - very easy

Cheers
Dave

Beautiful images Dave, I was out and tried to image Mars early in the night but the seeing was so turbulent that I got no detail at all from the first set of AVIs (taken about 20:30)

I did get a little detail later but nothing like you did. It is interesting though to see the change in shape and size as we leave it behind for another two years.

www.kerryastronomyclub.com/gallery-plan.htm

I had a look at Saturn but the clouds beat me to capturing any images.

Michael

Michael,
I think Mars is just going to get harder and harder over the next few months, all the same you captured the phase well.

Dave,
According to reviews on the web, the LPI gives worse images then the ToUcam, I dont know about the celestron camera, anyone here got one??
How did the galaxy images come out, how much can you see of them ???

thanks lads,
I
The 2 images are to scale, these are the relative sizes of the 32 planets,

dave,
is there something you know that we don't? . nice images btw.
stephen.

Dave must have logged quite a number of new Kuiper belt planetoids lately :lol: Great images lads. I'm really struggling with Mars now through my small scope but Saturn is providing a great target.