Hi all,

Another fair eve here on May 8th allowed to grab a spotless Saturn getting closer and closer to the Sun.

PICTURE

Thank you for your attention.

Hi all, on May 2nd I could finally capture some storm on Saturn for the first time this year. As a compensation-bonus, I captured the actual nice pair where the following spot is seen as a 45 deg tilted 8 shape.
Such a double spot is also seen in an image captured 8 (yeah, another 8…) minutes later, so I can fairly state it’s real although the odd shape.

The preceding spot is less concentrated and fading over the W-E direction.
The poor transparency caused by thin cirrus lowered somewhat the color contrast. Seeing was steadily fair.

IMAGE

Also, notice the Saturn bright disc seen through the Cassini division. On late March, the dark rings’ shadow was seen:

MARCH 29 IMAGE

Saturn won’t cease to amaze me!

Hi all, During last weekend of March I drove on southern Tuscany to relax myself and I also brought my scope given the nice weather forecasted.On Friday 28 a 100 km/h jetstream overhead turned a steady Saturn as smooth but on the following night it died down enough, so I had a fairly good seeing.
Moons all way around looked like small diamonds at the eyepiece! What a nice view!

No spots detected over the 2 nights at these longitudes, but I’m amazed indeed in having captured the weak Enceladus moon so close to the bright Saturn disc and, above all, the even weaker Mimas “shining” at 12.8 magnitude with a filtered exposure as short as just 60 msec!
Transparency was excellent and the sky ink black, no wind and no dew at all.

SATURN MARCH 28
SATURN MARCH 29

The 2 images were captured from Villa Tatti, the best italian villa I know!
Thank you for your attention.

Hi all,

I take this opportunity to proudly introduce you the new restyling of my personal website so nicely done by my dear friend Davide Del Vento (thank you so much, Dav!) who spent his own free time in making all of this and, above all, in making me convinced this solution was the way to go!

After having missed a good opportunity of catching Mars from here in Lowres Land, the same would have happened also with Saturn if I wasn’t so brave to push myself beyond my limits!
So far, I never considered a multipoint alignment also with Saturn, neither the manual hand picking of the raw frames, neither the stacking of several images captured over different nights. But all of this was due in order to have a decent image at least for the 2008 and not to trash any single image captured on last February.
At the end, I stacked 2800 luminance frames out of 80.000 (1 out of 28, a thin 3.5% only!) captured over three nights across the opposition to put Saturn 2008 banding in a nice show.

I only hope this is the first time AND the last one as well I’m forced to do this!

Hi all,

On May 22nd I could have a nice view of the Saturn occultation despite high clouds were persistent overhead since 2 days and cleared out just 2 hours before of the event!
Seeing poor as always and fairly good transparency.
A red filter was used with my usual equipment.

Timing:

1st contact: h. 19:32:59 UT
2nd contact: h. 19:33:55 UT
Elapsed time: 54 seconds.
http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/saturn/ingressus_divx.avi
(464 kb, DivX format)

3rd contact: h. 20:38:33 UT
4th contact: h. 20:39:52 UT
Elapsed time: 79 seconds.
http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/saturn/egressus_divx.avi
(2.76 Mb, DivX format)

Max error within +/- 0.5 seconds due to the poor seeing.

Geographical Coords:

LAT: 44° 02′ 30″
LNG: 10° 06′ 13″
Alt. 40 m.

To follow a still frame sequence.

Hi all,

On April 9th I spent the whole day in the Appennines at 1300 meters
altitude and the night up there did bring to me a very nice sky with
excellent transparency and decent seeing.

This is my best Saturn image so far along this [beeeeep] 2007
apparition, the great sky darkness delivered a nice C ring and vivid
colors for a change. The vertical oriented image let me better enjoy
with the Saturn belts system. Is this happening with you, too?

2000 out of 4700 frames (at 26 fps) stacked with any CMY filter in
binning 2x mode. Unbinned streams weren’t as good as the only binned one
I recorded, so there’s still room enough to get better results.
Still hope to say hallo to Saturn in a better way then.

Thank you for your attention.

Il giorno di Pasquetta trascorso nel meraviglioso Parco dell’Orecchiela
si è concluso con questa ripresa di Saturno che, pur non eccezionale, è
pur sempre la mia migliore di questa [beeeeeeep] apparizione.

La trasparenza eccezionale e un seeing quantomeno decente mi hanno
permesso di riprendere al meglio l’anello C e i colori delle varie
bande, per me meglio visibili nell’immagine verticale. Succede così
anche a voi?

2000 frames su 4700 (a 26 fps) sommati per ciascun canale CMY in binning
2×2. Il seeing non mi ha permesso di avere migliori risultati in
modalità unbinned a piena risoluzione, quindi ci sarebbe ancora un certo
margine prima di dare l’addio definitivo al Gigante degli Anelli.
Speriamo.

Hi all,

In my neverending war against the turbulence I gave a new weapon a try
and I was succesful!
For my very first time, I used a subtractive CMY filter set by Edmund
Optics to get the exposure lowered and the framerate increased at the
same time by a conspicuos factor 2 respect to the RGB filter set!

I was amazed by the result, expecially if I consider the planet was
placed in the Full Moon galore (a less than full disc away from the
lunar limb only) and visually the look was VERY poor due to the strong
turbulence.

Nothing of particular was noted on the disc.
The image may look as a tad overprocessed: I’ve also a new and wonderful
LCD 19″ monitor which is simply merciless with any image defect. Hope to
improve as soon my results with this interesting filter set.

Hi all,

On Jan. 10 after a cloudy period with light rain lasting since 4 days
and 4 nights (!!!) I had a quite unexpected clearing around local
midnight when I was going to bed. Fortunately, I noticed my thermo
falling down to 9°C (it was parked at 13°C for several days) and I
decided to go out.

Quite poor transparency due to the heavily wet air (it stopped raining a
few hours before) and thin cirrus. Seeing mediocre at the start and
reasonable around 2 AM.

I must confess I wasn’t expecting such results!
Find here an RGB image:

I took this in 2×2 binning mode and 200% resampled through the Iris’
Drizzle command. No particular activity noticed at this longitude.

After that, I tried to use the unbinned mode taking away the IR blocking
filter and using the R filter by alone. The poor transparency caused a
weak and noisy signal, so I averaged the best 4 streams I could capture
within half an hour. No WOS detected in any stream, so I could do this
with no problem.

I was amazed in having had such a result:

The color layer is coming from the RGB image as above.
Can’t wait for a good seeing!

Hi all again,

I’m living a quite hard professional period and weather still persists
on making my days very frustrating, hence my silence.
I’m slowly coming out of the tunnel, hope 2006 will be over once forever.

Find here a new image of Saturn taken in poor seeing conditions but
using an innovative tecnique which much improved the final result.
Thanks to this, now the situation is a bit less desperate…

To follow, several lunar images which could noticeably improve with this
tecnique.