Bultaco Loc: Aiken, SC

Very well done, great detail.

yssirk123 Loc: New Jersey

Beautiful!!!

Chuckwal Loc: Boynton Beach Florida

Cool

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Yep I read a similar article recently that mentioned that the rings may have been create a few hundred million years ago by either the collision of two small moons or possible one moon getting ripped appear by the gravitation tidal forces created by Saturn. These tidal forces currently heat up the interior of Saturn's moon Enceladus melting water in its interior creating what is believed to be a large underground ocean. In fact the Cassini probe was able to fly through some of this water blown off the surface from giant geysers on the surface of Enceladus and detect salt and organic compounds in the plume.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Thanks to all for checking out the photos.

angler Loc: StHelens England

Excellent

suminblacky Loc: Mercer Pa.

Excellent photos. Great detail. I'm wondering way Titan isn't in your Saturn picture. (I just downloaded that RegStax 6 and I'm just starting to figure it out. So I don't know what I'm talking about.) I've been staring through telescopes for years and haven't seen such detail.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi suminblacky
The reason Titian doesn’t show up is that it is far dimmer than Saturn and didn’t even register on the DSLR sensor at 1/30th of a second that each frame was taken at in the video. In the case of Jupiter the moons are much brighter and did register but required me to brighten them up while leaving Jupiter alone in order to see them in the photo. Also the image scale was zoomed in for Saturn so even if it had been bright enough it wouldn’T have been in the cropped image

suminblacky Loc: Mercer Pa.

Oh...Thank you, I didn't know that. I just asked because whenever look at Saturn, Titian is always there somewhere. But your right the Galilean moons are much brighter than Titan. Just learned something. Thank You.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi suminblacky
The human eye has a tremendous dynamic range ~14 F stops (this is particularly true in dim light) while the best sensors top out around 11 so it requires a few tricks to get a very bright object and dim object to look correctly in a given image. To get an image of Titan and Saturn would probably require taking two separate images, one with Saturn exposed correctly and then one with Titian exposed correctly (this would blowout Saturn). You could then remove the blown-out image of Saturn from the Titian image and combine this with the correctly exposed image of Saturn (I would leave a hint of Saturn in the blown-out image to make sure I got the registration correct). I in fact did something like this to get the moons brightened in image of Jupiter. I didn’t actually need to take a separate image since the senor did see the moons, they were just very dim in the correctly exposed image of Jupiter. In this case I duplicated the image of Jupiter and brightened it to show the moons (This blew out Jupiter and lost detail in the planet). I then removed almost all of the image of Jupiter in the image with the moons and recombined this image with the original to get the final image. Since this was actually created from the same image the registration was easy (But I did leave a very faint image of Jupiter in the moon image just to make sure). Below are jpeg versions of the images I used to do this (I actually used tiff files but they tend to be too big to save on the website).

Jupiter correctly exposed but moons very dim

(Download)

Image brightened to show moons

(Download)

Blownout Jupiter greatly dimmed (just a faint outline left)

(Download)

Composite image from the first and thrid images above

(Download)

flathead27ford Loc: Colorado, North of Greeley

Very cool!

ClarkG Loc: Southern Indiana USA

Wow! Great shots! I KNOW how much work is involved to get those shots!