From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: April 21, 2005 1:37:38 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] saturn with five moons

Hi Alan;

Absolutely stunning. I couldn't see the 5th moon until I inverted the image, but it was, just to the left of the rightmost moon and about a rings thickness from the leftmost side of the ring. Really really gorgeous and thank you for sharing it with us.

Have you submitted this to Sky & Telescope yet?? If not please do as that is a phenomenal shot and should be shared with the amateurs all over the world.

Interesting how the Red channel is giving you so much more detail and turbulence stability too. With the Color cameras, you can explicitly view the red channel in Astro IIDC, so it might be interesting to see how that works out, as it should have a similar effect as using a red filter.

On a side note, yesterday my order from Kendricks arrived (after an 8 week wait on the Orion rings) and I  "flocked" my Orion MAK scope (tube, secondary mirror baffle and main baffle) last night. All I can say is WOW - what a difference. Before that I'd never seen the airy disk with the scope for bright stars and the glare from Jupiter's bright equatorial bands would basically wipe out any detail in the bands. Just viewing the sky last night was different as the background was black and stars showed up much more distinctly, so I'm fairly sure I was getting pretty atrocious light scatter.

If I get steady skies, I hope to tweak the collimation a little bit to see if I can improve it a bit as it looks to be a bit out.

TTYL..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com

www.outcastsoft.com

On 21-Apr-05, at 12:55 PM, Alan Friedman wrote:

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

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