First attempts at Saturn

I'd earmarked last night for about a week as my best attempts to (a) stay up late and (b) get decent imagery of Saturn. Well, the skies didn't cooperate as well as I liked. After setting everything up, the clouds rolled in on cue. While they did evacuate just in time for Saturn to make an appearance, they left a wake of turbulent air for me to try and see through.

This was probably the worst seeing I've had for the 925 CGEM and the ASI 224 camera. Regardless, I took some images. Because, you never know - you might get lucky!

I didn't though. I've only gone through about a third of the stacks I put up, but the results are pretty consistent. No matter how much post-processing I do, there's just not enough data in the noise to get really robust imagery. Oh well.

Here's a couple of images of my endeavours. Keep in mind Saturn was no more than 20 degrees above the horizon and directly over the treeline and my neighbor's home.

What did Galileo see when he pointed his telescope at Jupiter?

So I was futzing tonight with the ZWO ASI 224 and I tried something a little counter-intuitive. I asked myself "how well would the 224 image Jupiter through the Galileoscope"? The Galileoscope has, at best, jerky focusing, a 500mm focal length, rudimentary gunsight aligning, no tracking and uses a camera tripod as a stand. And the seeing tonight is listed as "poor" with lots of clouds. I was able to get one run in. It took about 20 minutes to set everything up and get the camera in reasonable focus so that I could ID the cloud bands of Jupiter on my monitor. I took 2000 frames and kept the best 30%. The results are below.


Even with my ham fisted editing it's still way better, I suspect, than what Galileo would have seen. :)