Since the 17th April we have had rain and more rain, and, as of 11 May, this was the only break in the weather. Seeing was average at best and I tried to get another shot of Saturn, this time with a barlow lens. Since the image was ‘boiling’ rather a lot, I think the mistake I made was to assume that a short exposure, albeit dim, would be superior to a longer exposure that might suffer from atmospheric distortion. The brighter ‘no filter’ images below seem to produce a slightly better result. Saturn is quite low and the light pollution from nearby Royston doesn’t help. Here is a composite RGB image taken with a x2 barlow through the VX14 (although the blue image was so faint I did cheat and use the green image again at 50% instead of the blue one – it does have a greenish tinge – oh well).
And then brightened a bit …
and then with no filter, so monochrome, but brighter …
and slightly more processed …
This just underlines to me that the seeing conditions are, of course, paramount, and that getting a short exposure in the video images appears to be counter productive and does not out weigh any atmospheric losses incurred from a longer frame exposure time.