From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: April 21, 2005 12:55:53 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: saturn with five moons

Hi all -

What a difference three weeks (and 37 million miles) makes! Saturn is

withdrawing quickly into the western sky and getting hard to capture

with clarity.

http://www.geocities.com/alanfgag/saturn_41805final.jpg

(also posted in the planetary folder in the group files area)

This was my first chance to try out a new manual RGB filter wheel with

my DMK21BF04 webcam and Astro IIDC beta 2.00.15. The detail (luminance)

was captured through the red filter. It is amazing what a difference this made in average

seeing (5-6/10) even though the exposures were 10 times longer (266ms). The white

light images were unusable due to constant atmospheric morphing of the

planet's shape.

At the end of this session I took a stream using a half second shutter

speed which captured a nice grouping of five moons (down to Mimas at

mag.12.9) clustered very close to saturn. This was combined with the

other data and processed in Photoshop.

10" f14.6 A/P mak/cassegrain with A/P 2x Barlow and SBIG RGB filters

for RGB, SBIG R filter for luminance.

Hope you enjoy it!

cheers-

Alan