Saturn last night

EDIT 20-05-2014:

I just did some post processing work and this is what I could get out of the 2500 Mars frames I had:

Mars with xbox webcam through 90mm achromatic refractor.

Mars with xbox webcam through 90mm achromatic refractor.

Although the image is still of fairly poor quality, I guess I like it. You would too, if you consider that this is what one of the better frames looked like:

Typical frame my xbox webcam took through the telescope

Typical frame my xbox webcam took through the telescope

Last night I imaged Saturn using my modified xbox webcam. This time I didn’t use my barlow as I found it significantly reduced the quality of the image. I guess that’s what you get for 25 euros. Also, as adviced by many on stargazerslounge.com, I took a lot of videos to get a total of about 3000 frames. Of these I stacked the best 1000 in AutoStakkert!2, used wavelets in Registax v6 and did some post processing in CS6. One thing I noticed the last time I imaged with my xbox camera, is that the red image is over illuminated and even blurry. This is probably due to the infrared filter I removed. So I guess I should put an IR/UV-cut filter on my wish list (which is quite full of astrophotography stuff 😉 ). Final Saturn picture is below. I also took thousands of frames of Mars and I will process these later.

Saturn from last night, stacked, RGB aligned, applied wavelets, adjusted contrast and used smart sharpening.

Saturn from last night, stacked, RGB aligned, applied wavelets, adjusted contrast and used smart sharpening.

I re-processed Saturn after I flipped it to get its correct position: seen from above. (The setup I have gives an upside down view on camera) I think the position of Saturn with respect to its rings is better visible in this image.

Rotated and alternatively processed Saturn

Rotated and alternatively processed Saturn

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