Saturn is well placed in the morning sky after midnight, approaching opposition on 2022 August 14. At 01:00 EDT it will be at its highest altitude above the horizon, due south. Unfortunately Jupiter trails behind it, so by the time I am outside at 03:00 Saturn has already gone past its peak and has started to slip down into the west.

It is a compromise between planet positions and an astronomers ability to totally screw up their sleep cycles 🙂

This first image is my first of the evening, with incorrect settings 🙂 The gain on the camera was set much to high (normally I leave it alone, but it must have stuck from an earlier session). You can see the noise and the grain in the image. It was a 30 second run using the best 25% of 1453 frames.

The last image of the session is here below, the best 25% of 3833 frames with a much lower gain, much less noise and grain as a result.

My normal image processing routine has changed a little… in the past it went like this:
firecapture SER, PIPP AVI, autostakkert! v3 PNG, registax v6 wavelets, ImageMagick for annotation.
I was finding that PIPP was cropping well, but generating a file that was much larger than the original, even with substantial cropping. The benefit of cropping was to achieve a fixed pixel size image, ie 600×600, so that the annotation code could put text in the correct places around the target of the image.
I have reprogrammed the batch annotation scripts and so far they are working out with a variable size image. the new sequence of processing is:
firecapture SER, autostakkert! v3 PNG, registax v6 wavelets, ImageMagick for annotation.

Once finalized, the original source .SER video files (huge! tens of GBs!) are moved into an archive folder and every few months that archive folder is removed with the contents going to TWO external SATA drives, one primary, one backup, and put on shelves until needed next.