If you haven't looked at Saturn recently, you need to do so. It's near opposition still so the planet is nice and big. Lots of moons can be seen, and of course the rings always please.
I took this image tonight during a rather short session in the dome, using a Phillips webcam and the 14" RCX. It's a stack of a couple of hundred exposures, which were taken as an .avi movie, which was then fed into the freeware program Registax. Total camera time was only about 60 seconds. It just amazes me what we can do these days as amateurs. Sure, there are currently pictures coming out of NASA's Cassini mission that make mine look amateur; but I get more pleasure sitting in the warm night air and taking my own image than I do looking at theirs.
Which reminds me, the hot weather is coming on fast. I think the cold nights are gone for a while around here.
I missed blogging about the Saturday night Huachuca Astronomy Club meeting; a few of us (Dean, Larry, Steve, and myself) drove down and enjoyed a great talk by Adam Block. Adam's topic was Contrast in image processing and as always I learned a few important tips. His knowledge about image processing seems endless. We also saw the full moon rising as we drove down, but could not identify any effect from the lunar eclipse; I think it had finished a few minutes before rising for us here in the Western U.S.
The weather prediction for the next few nights is clear, so I'm hoping to get in some limited observing. My focus these days is on tax season so any astronomy adventures will be a bit tempered. But there a bunch of astronomical events coming up soon, including next weekend's Messier Marathon and Pluto Occultation.
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