Tonight, this morning, I went out to the observatory and looked at Saturn

I looked at it for about four hours and took a lot of photos. I didn't have the Stellacam, but kept taking stills through the eyepiece using my Canon Eos, Sony Hdcam and my iPhone. I was using extremely high power. Conditions were not perfect, but viewing was pretty good. I could throw an 8mm and get a pretty sharp image of Saturn. Actually the 10mm was about the limit for visual and the 15mm looked a lot sharper. The 25mm was amazing. I also put a 2x Barlow on many of the eyepieces. I tried taking photos through various combinations and filters as well. The 2x Barlow and 8mm lens gave some interesting almost full screen views of Saturn when coupled with digital zoom on the iPhone. The image was fuzzy at that high power to the naked eye but still looked okay in a camera shot. It was a challenge to get a goo steady shot because I was holding the camera up against the eyepiece, handheld requires ore time and more shots to be taken. The cold air at times would chill my hands and make steady photography difficult. We were way beyond theoretical viewing limits of the system when you take into account the digital zooming.

At times I just shot through the 8mm eyepiece, which was a challenge. I zoomed in as well digitally with the 8mm eyepiece on the c14 and tried getting some nice shots.

I actually took a few decent shots, but nothing like a real Stellacam and avi clip coupled with processing could give. I sent some of the iPhone photos to club members. This was late at night. Tim Dey sent back one of the iPhone photos I sent him after touching it up a bit with filters and processing in photoshop.

Here's what he sent me back. Not bad for a photo through an eyepiece with an iPhone.

He said he'd give me a much better photo if I'd take some footage with the Stellacam. I need to hook it up to a pc however and record the output using an avi recorder so it can be processed. We don't have a capture card in the computer for the Stellacam. Once we get a dazzle setup for HJRO we will be able to use the Stellacam, because it's sending video out.

I can record the video into my Macintosh, but the QuickTime recording doesn't import into a program we'd use to process the avi movie. We tried converting a QuickTime video to avi, via the Macintosh and the common software we'd use to process the movie would not read the file.

At the end of the evening, nearly 4am Saturn started looking better through the eyepiece. I looked up and realized I was looking through part of the shutter with the c14 and there was a thin layer of cirrus clouds. I would never thought Saturn could look so good through thin cloud cover. The thin clouds actually filtered the light and made it look better with more contrast and more gradient levels of cloud patterns visible. The sky was vary stable and fairly transparent.



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