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***On May 22nd 2007 during the daylight, Saturn was occulted by the Moon. At 19:06 UT (by my time-piece!), the Moon, (moving eastwards) moved in front of Saturn with its preceeding eastern dark half. Then at 20:12 UT, the planet began to re-emerge from behind the Moon's western Sunlight half. The images that I have captured are stills from webcam avi-files of the planet re-emerging.***
Saturn is the second largest planet and the only one with an easily identifiable ring system that can be observed in small telescopes. Together with the rings, Saturn is the most picturesque of the planets. Having a retinue of 47 moons (1/5/2006 NASA), 5 to 7 of which can be glimpsed in medium-sized amateur telescopes.
Saturn Facts Average Distance from the Sun: 71,426,725,400 km / 885,904,700 miles / 9.53707 A.U.
Equatorial Radius: 60,268 km / 37,449 miles
Equatorial Circumference: 378,675 km / 235,298 miles
Imaging the planet is always a challange, but when the the Seeing/Transparency is Good, obtaining a great image is a possibility. Unfortunately this is not always so.
Below are images that I caputured and stacked using a standard Philips Toucam Pro PC740K webcam placed at prime focus of the scope. Usually I will capture anything from 1 to 2 minutes of webcam images. Then the AVI-file will have each frame aligned and stacked using Cor Berrevoet's excellant Registax. Finally, I will finish the processing using Photoshop where liberal use is made of various filters.
....If you click on an image then a larger picture will be displayed along with telescope/planet details.
Updated 11/10/2008
All images are Copyright © John Cox 1995-2008
