I Doon't Have the [Processing] Power!

Although I am not 100% happy with this image, it is still the best image of Saturn I have yet captured and more than I expected with the compression artefacty raw data I used. Next time I'm going to check to make sure it is good data before I start taking everything apart even if I am cold and tired.

I had originally planned to image Mars since it was a day after its opposition and it's the first time the weather was nice locally on this planet in weeks. Unfortunately the weather on Mars was less than ideal and I could see no surface detail at all. Unless the glare of the moon was washing everything out but I do not think this is the case.

Luckily my favorite planet, Saturn started peeking out from behind the trees so the night was not a total loss! In the image below you can see the Cassini Division even if it isn't very sharp and notice the vague cloud band on the planet itself. My processing wasn't kind to it, but if you look carefully you can also see the shadow cast on the rings behind the planetary sphere.

I tried processing this four seperate times with different reference frames and interestingly, the blurry frames yielded the best results. The frames where I could barely see the Cassini Division caused the final image to look even more distorted and unpleasant to look at.

Who Spilled Ink on my Sun?

Typically, I can get better shots of the sun using just my phone's camera pointed through the eyepiece, (with solar filter in place so my eyes don't burn out or my mirrors melt or something else as spectacularly tragic) but I could never tell if I captured the granulation of the Photosphere or if it was just electronic noise.

This is processed in Registax using the Celestron Neximage 5, which is a ginormous improvement over whatever the name of my previous imager is. I used fewer frames here than I would have otherwise liked and I couldn't tell if I was in focus or not (bahtinov masks don't work on the sun!) So it's less than ideal... but you can clearly see what I'm going to call convection cells. It was also imaged in white light and desaturated so it's not in a pleasing artificial yellow color you might see elsewhere.

As I understand it, no one really knows how to use Registax any better than I do and that makes me feel better.