Saturn has too many rings ??

Finally after a week that seems to have taken a month to pass, I had a clear night. After I'd done all I had to indoors, I got out and setup about 10pm. Leveled, powered up and used Solar System Align with the 5mm Ortho on Saturn. Then I swapped the optics out of the back end of the scope, and replaced it with the Prism Diagonal, 2x Barlow and the SPC900, wired up to the laptop. I got focus, although it all looked a bit soft. I thought I'd try a little experiment and inserted the 30mm extension tube between the barlow and the webcam. This made the image bigger. Excellent.

I took 2 AVI's of about 2000 frames each. One using k3ccdtools, the other using wxastrocapture. After the second one I capped the scope and took a 200 frame AVI of darks. Then using registax, stacked the first avi, then converted the dark avi to a single file, need to remember the correct formats that registax can load for future, and used the darks to subtract from the second avi. I'm not quite sure what happened, but I guess either the focus was a little out or the seeing was poor, but I've got some ghosting in the ring system, and it looks like there are 2 rings around the planet. I also don't know why the second one came out quite so yellow.

K3CCDTools


WXAstroCapture - darks


The above took nearly an hour. I then converted back to optical use, mirror diagonal, extension tube etc, dropped in the 24mm Hyperion and used the Goto to hop round to have a look at the Beehive M44. A lovely looking cluster, it is, and with the 24mm Hyperion, I can see the two stars of Cancer either side. Whilst I was looking a very faint dot passed through the field of view. It was slow enough that it wasn't a meteor, so I think it was probably a Satellite. The best I can find on Heavens Above is Envisat, but I'm not so sure, as the Envisat pass was supposed to be quite bright, and whatever this was, was much dimmer than the stars in the hive.

I then popped inside and grabbed my Planisphere for a check around the constellations. I have finally managed to work out where Virgo is, it's clearing the roofline of the house now. For the same reason, I found, Hercules, Lyra, and Serpens Caput. Corona Borealis was quite easy to see, once I'd got my head oriented. And looking to the North, through the murk around Gatwick airport, I was able to see some of the stars of Cygnus.

I then used the Goto to have a look at a couple of Globular Clusters, M3 and M13. My scope is a little low powered to be able to do these clusters justice, but by using the 5mm Hyperion, I was able to bring the cluster out far more, but couldn't make out any of the stars.

At this point, some clouds were moving in and I was getting cold, so I headed indoors. I'm not sure what I'm going to be able to do with the webcam images. I think I'm going to have to wait for the moon to come around before trying webcam imaging again.