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Saturn (IR) with Mimas and Rhea - 14 Sep 2024
In 1 collection

Backyard
Acquisition
12000 × 10.00ms
82%
Equipment
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Description
This was my 3rd session with Saturn in a week, after no astro for nearly 6 months. I finally feel that I'm getting back into the saddle. Conditions when I started this session were truly awful. I wanted to get done earlier so that I could go to bed at a reasonable time, but that meant Saturn was at only 26° elevation and on reflection (no pun intended), I think the scope was pointing close to where I was sitting, so thermals coming from me didn't help. Once Saturn gained a bit more elevation and the scope moved away from me, the seeing significatly improved, giving me the best that I've experienced this apparition. I ran a couple of 12x2min sequences at 10ms, one each for RGB and IR (742nm). The IR data in particular was much better than previous sessions allowing me to push the processing quite hard to reveal a couple of Saturn's moons, Mimas (or it's nearby shadow) seen in transit as a dark dot below the rings on the left and Rhea as a white dot just off Saturn's disc at 2 o'clock.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Following discusion with British Astronomical Association (BAA) members, Richard McKim, Martin Lewis and Mike Foulkes and subsequent analysis by Martin and me, I have concluded that the dark spot originally thought to be Mimas, or Mimas's shadow transit, is more probably an artefact introduced by the moon correction tool in WinJupos. Our suspicions were aroused by the lack of any feature in any of the SERs, or quality graded, stacked and stretched data, only being seen once the moon correction feature was enabled together with de-rotation.
After flipping the WinJupos measurement frame 180°, Saturn's moon Rhea is now seen as a grey streak in the low left of the image where it should be, reflecting it's motion over the duration of the capture session, but WinJupos still places a dark spot for Mimas in the same location as the original image using unflipped data, but now adjacent to Rhea instead of diagonally opposite the other side of Saturn and it's rings where it should be - see the below highly stretched image...

This experience shows just how careful we need to be not to introduce artefacts, when using some of the more advanced processing tools that are now available.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Following discusion with British Astronomical Association (BAA) members, Richard McKim, Martin Lewis and Mike Foulkes and subsequent analysis by Martin and me, I have concluded that the dark spot originally thought to be Mimas, or Mimas's shadow transit, is more probably an artefact introduced by the moon correction tool in WinJupos. Our suspicions were aroused by the lack of any feature in any of the SERs, or quality graded, stacked and stretched data, only being seen once the moon correction feature was enabled together with de-rotation.
After flipping the WinJupos measurement frame 180°, Saturn's moon Rhea is now seen as a grey streak in the low left of the image where it should be, reflecting it's motion over the duration of the capture session, but WinJupos still places a dark spot for Mimas in the same location as the original image using unflipped data, but now adjacent to Rhea instead of diagonally opposite the other side of Saturn and it's rings where it should be - see the below highly stretched image...

This experience shows just how careful we need to be not to introduce artefacts, when using some of the more advanced processing tools that are now available.
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