Saturn the 'ringed planet'

Saturn as photographed from our garden in May 2012

Our wireless-router had to be replaced and as a consequence, we have had no Internet-Broadband connection for almost three weeks. The lovely Toot says that for several days after the router failed I displayed all the classic symptoms of Internet-Blog withdrawal! A tired listlessness, sweaty palms and a predilection for 'Bilge Talking.'  We are now back on line, so for those that care, I shall once again be posting a steady stream of information about the comings and goings in the Cabine.

In the last two weeks,we have had a few clear days and nights when I have been able to use my telescopes to sweep the 'Suffolk skies'. I have to say I was surprised at being able to capture the above view of Saturn using the HD movie setting on my Lumix compact camera. The technique applied involved attaching the camera to a telescope eyepiece using a bracket (afocal method) and focusing the image of Saturn on the LCD screen by adjustment of the focus knob on my 127mm refracting telescope. The size and intensity of the image was adjusted using the manual zoom on the camera.  I captured a two minute film clip which I converted from mov. to AVI format using the freeware RAD video BINK converter. The AVI clip was then split, aligned and stacked using the freeware Registax 6 and the resultant Tiff image was  finally sharpened and adjusted using Photoshop.

Saturn spinning silently in the velvet black of space

I have to say that I still get a buzz when I see Saturn through the eyepiece of my telescope. In my opinion it's a real show stopper!