Astronomy Adventure – Saturn

It has been an horrendous month for astronomy – incredibly humid, lots of rain, and cloudy almost every night. Mars reached opposition at the end of July and is closer than it will be for another 17 years while Saturn rides high in the southern sky. But the brutal weather has limited an really good observations.

In my last post, I wrote about the difficulties of really capturing the planets with my present setup for afocal astrophotography with an iPhone. Bad seeing and the difficulty of achieving truly good focus are the two biggest issues.

There are two different methods for photographing the planets. The first is to take a video and then use PIPP to convert the .mov file that the iPhone creates and convert it to an .avi file. Then you can use Registax to stack a percentage of the best frames from the video into a single image.  Here is a photo of Saturn produced using this method:

A different, but in many ways similar method, is to us NightCapPro to take multiple consecutive images and then find the one that actually provides the best image. Here is an example using that method:

To be honest, neither are particularly satisfying. Both of them were taken with 250x magnification ( and slightly different cropping which accounts for the size difference) which is probably pushing the limits of my telescope and the seeing conditions in my area. But without that degree of magnification, achieving proper focus is almost impossible.

Technical details for both images: