Thanks to the folks who stayed behind the weekly chat and kept me awake for more time. I was able to complete a 3 hour 10 minute imaging run of Saturn. It could have gone longer if I trusted the cable wrap issue on the mount. but I am glad I did not. Packed it in before midnight and the cables were in fact pretty tight.
So.. another thanks to Andrea for showing the rotating spokes of Saturns Rings. I had not thought of ever doing anything like that and I liked it!
So.. 48 imaging runs of Saturn last night from 00:27 to 03:36 UTC were completed. Saturn had just reached highest altitude of about 46 degrees. Each run was 180 seconds with a 60 second pause. The best 10% were processed with autostakkert! v4 and then all 48 images were put through registax for wavelet processing and then imagemagick for annotation.
I got rotating spokes in the rings! Woohoo!
I then took a crop of the animated gif to get this attached 400×300 pixel 1.3MB animated gif image.
I’ve also included one of the last better stills of the session.
Wow. I am still gobsmacked.. especially what with the bright moon about 60 degrees away, lighting up the sky.