Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

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.

This is from Friday morning of Saturn nearing opposition. Close enough to not even matter!
This is the best image of approx 34 runs that morning. It was at 07:33 UTC-4=03:33 EDT
taken with firecapture, stacked with Autostakkert! v3, wavelets in Registax v6, annotated with Imagemagick in Linux

It was taken past its highest altitude, down from maybe 30 degrees to 23 degrees in this image. more airmass to see through!

Atmospheric dispersion can be seen with blue on the top and red on the bottom of various features (like the rings). Perhaps a ZWO ADC would help!
https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/zwo-adc

Only a mere $128USD… pretty reasonable compared to almost *every* single other piece of astro kit!
seeing was poor, transparency was poor, the near full moon was very close within 4 or 5 degrees.
Still the best saturn image I have ever taken! Letsee what Saturday and Sunday night runs look like!

This is from the next night, Friday night/Saturday morning at 05:15 UTC-5=01:15 EDT
I had stayed up Friday evening and imaged Saturn as it came up out of the horizon … and they were all terrible.

Took a short nap, and got up again early on Saturday morning and did a few more runs before the clouds came and shut me down.

Again, seeing was poor, transparency was poor and the full moon was still within 20 degrees.
Exposure time was average, between 40 and 50ms. Colour contrast on the cloud bands not quite as good as 20220812.

taken with firecapture, stacked with Autostakkert! v3, wavelets in Registax v6, annotated with Imagemagick in Linux

The last of a 3 nights/mornings in a row.. the longest stretch of astronomy I have done in a long time!

So much so that I am unsure of day or night, orange juice or screwdriver? I only know that tomorrow is the “W” day and I must get to sleep real soon now.

Last night/this morning.. Saturday evening stayed outside with Kim doing some visual observing. at 22:00 went inside to watch The Game… CFL Sask at Edmonton. At half time they went into a delay due to thunder and lightning near the stadium. The game resumed and ended around 01:30, at which point I went outside and started some Saturn imaging runs. I was dead on my feet my this time. Not nearly enough nap time in the last two days to make up for the lack of sleep.

I noticed that I was falling asleep at the same time as some clouds were coming in, so I pulled the plug after an hour, or 15 runs.

The moon was much further away, the skies a little clearer. Seeing was maybe average, transparency maybe average.

The Rings look great and I can almost see a second division next to the Cassini division. Don’t know yet if that is a processing artefact or real.

The cloud banding was more pronounced as well… ok.. this is one of the best Saturn images of my imaging career

This is one of the better images of Jupiter on Saturday morning

Seeing I judged to be average, transparency average or a little lower.

08:30 UTC = 04:30 EDT.

The Great Red Spot is past central meridian and moving left to right.

The Jovian moon Europa is in the lower right moving left to right.

I managed to add some more details from the firecapture generated .txt file annotated onto the image, namely the airmass, altitude, CMI indexes (longitude data of Jupiter), Apparent Diameter and the total frames captured. Only the best 10% were used to generate the still image.

An animated video was created out of the 27 runs of the morning, with the first one or two showing a lot of digital noise because they were only 30 second runs, not 180 second runs… less data, more noise.

Also attached is the video. A curiousity… It shows 4 objects rotating around the planet. I use Stellarium as by source of information to identify the Jovian moons in aimages after the fact. Lower right moving away: Europa. Upper right moving in: Io

The lower left moving in and upper left moving out I cannot identify!

Stellarium shows that Ganymede is in the upper left but much farther away from the planet than it shows.

Nothing comes up for the lower left object moving in.

I thought of background stars moving but I rarely if ever pick up stars in these 10-20ms exposures.

Does anyone else have a handy and easy to use reference for information like this?

Lastly, some more dust motes appear in a few frames in the middle… have to clean the camera again!

This is Jupiter from the last imaging run of the morning.. approaching 05:30 EDT on July 27th. Jupiter is approaching zenith and in a few more weeks it will be ideally suited for the least atmosphere between it and me.

The North Equatorial Belt (NEB) is narrow but dark in colour and contrast. The Great Red Spot is nicely centered in this image.

Saturn on the morning of Tuesday 2022 July 26, at 04:28 EDT or 08:28 UTC.
I am still searching for a good reference to any of Saturn’s features, The Cassini Division is the biggest single feature on the whole image, dividing the rings into two distinct sections.
Some of the equatorial bands show around and above the equator. Several cloud bands are seen in various colours and brightness moving north.

This is an animation of all of the imaging runs from that night. The very first image has a wonderful dust spot. The first two images in the run are only 30 second runs, resulting in only a thousand frames or so. There are two processed images of each frame, the best 10% and the best 25% of the run.

The processing workflow is:
firecapture .ser, autostakkert! v3 to png, registax wavelet processing, ImageMagick annotation and conversion to .gif and .mpg