Back in June 2006, I shot my first image-from-video of Jupiter. I was so impressed, I had to try out the technique on Saturn. I'm not quite as impressed, but it is my best Saturn so far. I was able to bring out some new details. One of the the cloud belts is showing. So is the shadow of the planet cast onto the rings and possibly the C ring. The ring looks a little wider as it passes in front of the planet.
I took this by holding my 4Mpx Kodak Easyshare digital camera up to the 25mm eyepiece of my 8" f/6 Dobsonian with 2.5x barlow. (yielding 120x). I shot video at 640 x 480 @ 13fps for about 2 minutes. I had the camera zoomed in at 5x optical zoom. Since a Dobsonian doesn't track the sky, I would just move the scope around if Saturn went off screen. I ran it though Registax using only the top 10% of the frames, ignoring the ones where Saturn was off-screen. Some filtering, levels and saturation in Photoshop and away we go.
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