Saturn in 2016

[rwilkinson]

After I'd had a go at imaging Mars last night (see viewtopic.php?f=4&t=881&start=3), I decided to have a look for Saturn.
It was so low down in the mist & murk that I couldn't even see it with the unaided eye, so I needed to use my GoTo (already aligned on Mars) to get it into the field of my 9x50 finder-scope!
Then once I got my C8 centred on it, it was too faint to show up on my laptop screen at f/35, so I tried removing my Barlow-lens magnifier and went down to f/10. That did the trick: at least I had an image, but much smaller than I'm used to.

However this gave me the perfect opportunity to try out the x3 drizzling option in AutoStakkert for the first time. I was astonished at how well it all worked out:

Saturn on 8-Jun-2016. Imaged at f/10 and stacked using the 3x drizzling option in AutoStakkert.

saturn_2232.png (248 KiB) Viewed 2329 times

There was one other effect of imaging through this murk: the planet appeared very reddy-orange, so I had to make considerable corrections with the White-Balance to get the colours to look more realistic!