Astrophotography: Saturn

There are certain things you see for the first time that take your breath away.  I was on a family vacation in the North Carolina mountains when something like that happened to me.  We were actually on top of a mountain in Banner Elk and had this beautiful view to the sky.  I had just gotten my telescope and decided to set it up and look at the stars.  At that point I knew absolutely nothing about where any stars or planets were located.  So I just started aiming at stars and taking in the beauty of the night sky.  There was this one "star" that was so bright and I aimed my scope at that.   And you guessed it, it was Saturn.  It was the first time I had seen Saturn in real time with a telescope.  We have all seen majestic pictures of Saturn.  Yet is something different about seeing a dot in the sky that turns into this little ball with rings around it when you look into the eyepiece of a telescope.  I had unexpectedly found Saturn with my brand new telescope in the North Carolina mountains and I still remember that night like it was yesterday.

Once I had a bigger scope and a camera I wanted to try for a picture of Saturn.  I have posted in an earlier entry my first attempt to image Jupiter.    I learned a few things with Jupiter and so I think my attempt of Saturn turned out a little better.

Getting a picture of planets are unique.  You take a video of the planet and  then stack the best frames of the video.  You need a lot of frames because we are at such high magnifications that the atmosphere distorts your image.  Some frames are going to be less distorted than others.

Here is the video of Saturn.

Here is the final picture where I stacked individual frames from the video to clean up the final picture.  This picture was  taken with a Celeston EdgeHD 800 using a 4X barlow.   An ZWO ASI120MC camera was used to capture the video.

Hopefully the next attempt will be even better.  If you ever get a telescope make sure Saturn is your first target.  It is one of those things that makes a first impression you will never forget.