Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

The other night I took some video of Saturn and tried an experiment to see what I would get with a 370nm UV filter. I was very surprised at how more contrast and detail it got with it than any of the other filters. The atmosphere was fairly turbulent, and Saturn never got more than 35 degrees above the horizon, so video wasn't all that great and I only stacked 10% of the frames which still worked out to ~900 frames for each filter. The first image was using standard RGB and luminance filter, the second used the UV filter in place of the Luminance filter for the luminance channel.

All images were taken with at a 4096mm focal length at F10 with a Meade LX200 Schmidt Cassegrain using a QHY 290M mono camera. The video was taken with FireCapture as .ser files. processing of the video was done with PIPP (Planetary Imaging PreProcessor and then stacked with autoStakket (64bit). Winjupos was used to de-rotate the individual stacks and combining the LRGB images. Final sharpening and color correction was done with Pixinsight.
All questions comments and suggestions are welcome.

Saturn using Luminance, Red, Green and Blue filters.

(Download)

Saturn using a UV filter for the Luminance channel and the same Red, Green and Blue filters as the previous image.

(Download)

Railfan_Bill Loc: "Lost Wages", Nevada

Wow, Ballard, you hit a bases full home run with this image. I could only try with my setup to get this high quality image. Good Show!!!

PoppieJ Loc: North Georgia

And I was going to try and capture an image with a 900mm. Maybe I will just look at yours and wish

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi Railfan_Bill
Thanks for checking out the images of Saturn and for the comment.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi PoppieJ
Thanks for checking out the photos of Saturn and for the comment. 900mm is good for the moon and many deep sky objects but the planets usually require 2000mm + to capture much detail.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

Beautiful.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi rgrenaderphoto
Thanks for checking out the images of Saturn and for the comment.

Red Sky At Night

Wow! Impressive!

alberio Loc: Casa Grande AZ

Nice. Saturn is what I first saw in a 3" Sears telescope when I was 16 and it led to my astronomy addiction.

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

Very nice! I'll have to dig out my UV band pass filter.

bwa

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi Red Sky At Night
Thanks for checking out the images of Saturn and for the comment.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi alberio
Thanks for the comment and for viewing the images of Saturn. Looks like experimenting with some different filters paid off, I actually expected the UV filter to give a worse image than luminance since normally the red is the best, then luminance, then green then blue due to atmospheric turbulence, but this pattern didn't hold true for the UV, it was better than all the others.
I was hooked when I was just a kid in grade school but only now have the time and resources to really indulge.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi bwa
Thanks for checking out the photos of Saturn and for the comment. As I mentioned to alberio I was surprised that the UV filter gave the sharpest image of all the filters since normally I found that the higher the frequency of the light the more the atmospheric turbulence gets in the way, but this pattern didn't hold true for the UV filter.

thumpercat2

awesome!

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi thumpercat2
Thanks for checking out the photo of Saturn and for the comment. Note: a day of two after this I got a very slightly better version of Saturn where the Encke gap is just starting to be visible on the outer part of the ring system.
I posted this shot along with some shots of Jupiter at
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-749309-1.html

Note: I had to add minor correction to the image of the shadow of one of Jupiter's moon on the planet which is farther down in the post.