Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

This is the first imaging session for Jupiter since it went around the far side of the Sun and has appeared in the morning sky.
Its altitude is only 28 degrees and so is still fuzzy and distorted due to the long optical atmospheric path.
This is the best 10% of 14K frames of 6ms each in a 180 second run. The Great Red Spot makes an appearance.

The next image below is the next night, 20240719 and is the best 25% of 16K frames of 6ms each in a 180 second run.

This is Saturn, early in the morning on Thursday 2024 July 18.
It is nearing transitting due south, its highest point in the sky, but for now remains very low.
This causes us to see through a lot more atmosphere than otherwise and the image suffers from poor focus, atmospheric dispersion and a lot of bad seeing.

This is the best 10% of 8400 frames at 21ms each in a 180 second run. Altitude was about 40 degrees and Saturn’s size is about 18 arcseconds.

Serendipidy got us up and outside at 04:00 this morning and only then realized that it was one of the rare Titan transits the planet Saturn dates! The transit ran from 02:00-06:00 EDT approximately.
It was not forecast to be clear this morning and indeed it was not. quite a lot of haze (transparency poor, seeing average) and I got 9 imaging runs done as the cloud rolled in along with the fog.
exposures were approx 35ms in a 180 second run.
This image was the best of 10%, processed with autostakkert! v4 , drizzled x1.5 and then into registax for wavelet processing.
The scope continues to behave well as Saturn did in fact appear in the FOV of the primary camera after the initial slew to Saturn.
Titan appears as a dark spot near the bottom of Saturn.
Below is an animated .GIF of the 9 imaging runs, with the last ramping up from 35ms to 50ms and a lot of cloud.
The animated GIF shows Titan moving from left to right.

After months or procrastinating, some time made it available to process some of the imagery collected during the total solar eclipse of 2024 april 08.
The first three files here were .SER files and converted using PIPP into .avi and also cropping it down to 400×400 pixels.
Because it was quite cloudy here, many of the files were dark. These were deleted. We started with 138 files, and after deleting, about 100 video files.
They were combined using microsoft movie maker and then sped up x16, x32 and x64.

I noticed that some of these were incorrectly cropped by PIPP because of the cloud and general darkness… so they will be reprocessed at maybe 500×500 or 600×600 ine the near future

This is the best of 5 runs of Saturn taken on Monday morning July08… Up and outside at 04:00 EDT was an experience!

This was the best 10% of 9300 frames at 19ms each. Saturn was only 38 degrees off the horizon and there was intermittent wispy high cloud going by as well.

I’ve taken to change my process of: focussing, then doing a bunch of runs, to focussing, doing a run, then focussing again.. over and over. You know about lucky imaging.. this is the concept of lucky focussing 🙂 And it did work.

All 5 runs I focussed to the best of my ability and three of the results were bad!