Mooning Saturn Again

19-07-16 Titan 1799
Hey Bingo. To nights later and the “Titan” pinprick is in a different spot. Saturn itself has moved against the fixed stars as well but that’s fine. As usual the only thing that’s moved between the pictures is me! The earth has moved two degrees around it’s orbit(almost 2 million miles by the way) and parallax shifts Saturn accordingly. I may need to do the math on that for fun.

The image was done at full zoom f/6.5 ISO 1600, 1/2 sec. It’s cropped and the adjusted in Paint shop pro: +35 brightness, plus 97 contrast.

Mooning Saturn

19-07-13 Titan 1765
The yellowish blob mid right side is the planet Saturn(overexposed). Just above and to the right is its largest moon Titan. Titan is 5,000 km across which is big but it’s 1.3 BILLION km away and the light I captured had to travel 1.5 billion km from the sun out to Titan to get reflected back. The other pinpricks are stars that are too faint to have proper names.
This was taken at 1800mm focal length, f/6.5, ISO 6400, 1/4 second. Titan and the stars above and below saturn are all magnitude 9ish. The brighter one over to the left is mag 7.5.
The real trick here is to get back out again tonight or tomorrow and make sure that one pinprick has moved and others haven’t!

Saturn!

19-07-09 saturn
These were done around 10 pm July 9,2017. Camera was set at ISO 100, 1/50 sec, f/6.5. Zoom was at max optical and 4 X digital(gives a “focal length” figure of 1428). The picture size was set at 2272X1704 to reduce the effect of digital zoom. The planet with rings occupies about 100X55 pixels. These were cropped and brightened with paint shop pro +21 brightness, +21 contrast. If I do it again I’ll go up to 200 ISO.
19-07-09 jupiter 1731
The Jupiters were done at full optical zoom. The three larger ones were 2X digital zoom with picture size at 4608X3456. The smaller were 3X digital but with the picture size cut to 2272X1704. The settings were ISO 100, f/6.5. The first four at 1/60 sec, the last three at 1/100. Jupiter is 100X100 in the larger ones, 60X60 in the smaller. The images haven’t been brightened.

I would say the digital zoom might be worthwhile but cutting down the picture size is no benefit. I’ve just discovered the camera had adjustments for sharpening etc. These would have more effect on star photos but i’ll try neutralizing them.

It occurs to me also that saturn has a ton of moons. They are dimmer than jupiter’s in the mag 8-9 range which might just be visible in a long exposure.