Saturn May 4

Tonight must be the best of conditions yet since I started taking sky photos.  Transparency was good, seeing was also good.  In fact, there were so many stars out, I had trouble locating Saturn.  I eventually found it, after taking a webcam picture of the area around Gamma Virgo.  It captured gamma Virgo and 2 other dim stars, which are unidentified at present.

Here is the image of gamma Virgo:

 

Next are the 2 Saturn images.  These all were taken with the 127mm refractor using wxAstroCapture.

When I stacked these images, I had a strange blur, almost a double image just above the image.  I'm still not sure what was causing it, it is possible that the optics arent aligned perfectly.  I first thought that perhaps it was chromatic aberration, but all of the colors appeared, not just the blue, which is normal for that type of distortion.  It was not motion blur, as the first image was with the clock drive turned off, and let the planet drift across the field.  The blur appeared exactly the same as in the second image, with the clock drive turned on.



The first image is a stack of about 150 frames, the 2nd was a stack of about 350 frames.