Until Next Year Saturn

Saturn and Jupiter are both getting quite low in the western sky as it’s getting dark. Soon they will be gone altogether until next summer. Tonight was a rare evening that had nice weather, the kids were asleep, and I had time to take out the telescope.

My first thought was to get farewell pictures of both Saturn and Jupiter, but as I aligned my telescope on Jupiter it became immediately clear that wasn’t going to happen. Jupiter is very low on the horizon, and apparently the atmosphere is pretty turbulent tonight. Even visually I could barely make out the bands of color on Jupiter, it was a blurry mess thanks to all the atmosphere. Clear sky chart has my area as poor viewing (2/5).

Saturn is higher in the sky than Jupiter so I thought I might have more luck. The atmosphere was still not cooperating, but a picture was at least possible. It’s not the best image and no gap is visible in the rings, but it will do as a send-off image.

I used my 10” telescope and my modified webcam. Because of a quirk in the webcam drivers I can’t tell the exact settings used in sharpcap, so I had to set the exposure and gain by eye. Saturn is dim enough that I need to set the gain to the max of 255, and then get the shutter speed as fast as I can without losing the image completely. I need a fast shutter speed because I’m manually tracking the Saturn and I don’t want vibrations from my hand to blur the image too much.

The video was a minute and a half long, I aligned the frames in PIPP, stacked the top 20% of frames in autostakkert, and did some wavelets sharpening in registax.

I always love seeing Saturn, it’s probably the most beautiful object in the night sky. Besides the moon it’s the sight that gets the most “wows” from people. It was a great summer, but it’s time to say goodbye until 2020.