Saturn 2022Aug28
This is the Ring Planet Saturn in the early morning hours of Sunday 2022 August 28th.. just past midnight actually local Eastern Daylight Time.
This is near peak altitude, which is still quite relatively low, at almost 30 degrees above the southern horizon.
The planet itself has an apparent diameter of 18.6 arc seconds, with the rings almost double that.
This was a 180 second run resulting in 4100 frames captured, each at about 43ms. After processing the best 10%, 25% and 40%, I chose to further process only the best 10%.
The processing pipeline is: autostakkert!v3 for align, stacking and drizzling x1.5, registax v6 for wavelet processing, and Imagemagick for annotation by parsing the firecapture text log file.
I still hope to add another step or two afterward, perhaps some contrast and colour saturation.
Some other members of the club took an image like this and processed it in Adobe photoshop, splitting the image into 3 colour channels (RGB) and then aligning them to overcome the Atmospheric Dispersion caused by looking through so much airmass. In this image without that additional work, you can se in the back of the rings, a blue tinge on the top of the ring and a red tinge on the bottom of the ring.
You can also purchase a piece of equipment, an ADC, from ZWO as perhaps elsewhere, to correct this at the source.
Below is the animated .GIF of the seven runs of Saturn showing shorter 30 second runs to record seeing, and spotting of a dust mote and shifting the planet to another section of the sensor.
