On July 8th I visited the Kalium Observatory and using the projection photography technique managed to capture 67 mostly unusable images of the planet. I hand-held the camera in front of the telescope eyepiece, shot at 3200, f5.6, between 1/60 and 1/180s. Like this:
The Kallium Meade LX200 is mounted to the building and so the slightest breeze or breath causes shake. I learned also that night the very basics about viewing conditions and the way the sky itself can make for poor ‘seeing conditions‘. When seeing conditions are bad it reminds me of looking down a hot paved road – everything shimmers.
The best of those images appears as the banner on this blog, and was the same frame used for the Critical Faculties exhibition. That image now stands as the 2011 image: the first yearly image I hope to make for each year of Saturn’s orbit around the sun [29.42 years].