Saturn 2023May17
Outside this morning for my first Saturn Season imaging run.. with the new ZWO ASI585MC camera
Saturn was only 19 degrees off the horizon, seeing and transparency was poor, and it was also in the Kingston Light Dome.
Also Saturn is only 17 arcseconds big at the moment… but every day it will get closer and larger!
earlier in the day:
Up at at’em at 04:00 EDT this morning for the first clear skies in 11 days. Still windy from the north.. gusty even.
Started with a 3 star align on arcturus, vega and altair. By the time I got to Altair I realized that the first start I aligned on was NOT in fact Arcturus 🙁
So I Did it again, this time only a two star… arcturus and vega. That seemed to work.
Told it to go to Saturn… my first day in the new Saturn imaging season.
It was over 1/2 degree out! arrg. Will have to read through the process again and see what is up with that!
So by now it was 04:45 and the robins started to sing and it was getting brighter. I did 3 runs of Saturn imaging at 30 seconds, discovered that I needed to FlipY in the software optics to get the correct planetary orientation, and then two runs of 180 seconds.
Saturn was only 18 degrees off the horizon in the SE (ie in the Kingston Light Pollution Dome), seeing was poor, transparency was poor, wind was gusty and it was getting into twilight.
The new camera worked out well.. The bigger field of view worked out. I was able to ROI (Region of Interest) down to about 700 or 800 pixels and was running around 18ms exposures at 50fps +
Had to fix the task scheduler job that moved image files from the observatory SSD drive and into the house, then ran them through autostakkert! v3
Used only the best 5% and put those through Registax for wavelet processing and RGB colour balance.
The end result? No bad.. not bad at all. There is noticeable ADC (Atmospheric Distortion, with Blue on top and red on the bottom) so I am still seriously considering the ZWO ADC (AD Corrector).
At my desk at work now… seriously considering if anyone will notice if I take a nap or not?