Picture of Saturn taken on 11-13-2002 at 6:30 am using a Philips Vesta Pro 690K and a Televue 2.5X Powermate on a 12.5" f/5 Portaball. Tracking was achieved with a Tom O. single axis platform. Recorded an avi file at full 640x480, 30 fps, 1/33-second exposure, manual gain of around 70-80%, for a total of 1041 frames. Picture is the result of the 492 best frames picked using Avi2Bmp, then stacked and processed with dyadic filter in Registax. It was necessary to make four individual stacks; three of 120 frames and one of 132 frames. Each stack required boosting color saturation in Adobe Photoshop 5.0 LE prior to final stacking in Registax. For some reason, Registax suppresses much of the color even when color processing mode is used. Final processing in Adobe Photoshop still required more color saturation and a pinch of Gaussian blur. Note: Trying to boost color only at the end created too many artifacts. Boosting color saturation at various steps solved this problem. Sky stability was pretty good for Indiana in order to use this high of a percentage of frames.

Photo by David keller