Day: 9 July 2026

23:59 – 04:11

I uncovered the scope to cool it down and then went to bed until 1:30am. I then got up and went out to image Saturn which would appear around 2:30am from behind my Oak tree. The outside temperature was still 19ºc so pleasantly warm.

I will attempt to capture the charts for the Jet stream from net weather.tv, and the charts for cloud cover, transparency and seeing from skippysky.com.au both excellent sources of information for lunar and planetary imaging. As can be seen below it was a perfect night.

I had many challenges. Not least adjusting my polar alignment that had shifted slightly since the previous night out. I then struggled for an age to get SharpCap to plate solve, finally realising that it was due to being out of focus!

Once focused it was easier to polar align. I did need tonight to rack up the exposure to 37s to do so, so I must go back and look at my original settings from my other session and compare.

After that I could get Saturn on the chip after a manual spiral search and Saturn was only slightly misaligned on the OTA and I started imaging.

Here is a video of one of my capture sessions.

The settings I used were based on hitting Auto sharpen and then adjusting slightly. I did try Auto sharpen more but this was too much.

This means you go from this unsharpened image to this sharpened one. So much better but I could get better focus and improve my use of the ADC.

I then took the tip from Mark Radice and set the stack to only use the best 30% of frames and just drop the rest.

Once this was done it was time to head back to bed at just gone 4am.

23:30 – 01:40

Luke and I setup the S30 Pro with the Antlia Triband RGB filter to see what difference it makes.

Meanwhile I have taken the Telegizmo cover off the 180 Mac ready to go after the Moon at midnight and Saturn again after 2:30am.

After waiting for the majority of the “night” as it is, at 10 past 1 I slewed to the Moon and started to image using SharpCap 4.1. The image was not great as the seeing due to the Jet stream being overhead was not ideal, but it gave me a start on re-imaging pieces of the Moon. I managed to at least grab a single stacked image of the 3 large craters at the edge of Mare Nectar’s, namely Theophilus, Cyrillus and Catharina.

I must admit to having problems with remembering how to use the ADC so I will watch a video over the next few days.

Meanwhile the S30 Pro also struggled under the not dark skies but again produced an ok image given the lighting conditions.