2021 Saturn Imagery

Another evening of pretty good seeing, but not quite as good as on August 21st. A few of Saturn's moons are also visible in the image below.

I processed two more images from the 21st, and overexposed one to show the moons, then overlayed that on top of the regular exposure of Saturn to show the moons. I also added labels to one version of the image. Note that I flipped Saturn on the x-axis in these to match reality since it was mirror-reversed in the telescope.

My best Saturn image of the year so far. It was a hot and humid evening with little wind, and a ridge of high pressure in place aloft, so I figured the seeing would be good and indeed it was. As usual for this year, this was taken with my Celestron 8" EdgeHD telescope and my ASI385MC camera with a Televue 2.5x Powermate and a Baader UV/IR cut filter.

Another Saturn image with the 8" EdgeHD. I adjusted the color balance during processing, so more neutral than yesterday's image. Seeing was still rather poor thanks to strong winds out of the southwest at 5-7 thousand feet.

Imaged Saturn this morning with my C8 Edge HD. I finally had a morning in which I didn't have to work early and it wasn't completely cloudy, so I was able to take the telescope out and image Jupiter and Saturn. Seeing was unfortunately very poor this morning, and a thin overcast was present, both of which combined to make the details on the planets hard to see. This is a far cry from the better images I was able to achieve last year.

Imaged Saturn from Pensacola, FL while on vacation with my little TV 60. The seeing was pretty good, but I was using a Manfrotto tripod with no tracking or slow-motion controls which limited the number of usable video frames I was able to capture. The image looked at least as good, if not better, than this visually, but the lack of focal length made it challenging to capture.