For some time now, perhaps a decade or more, the Internet/PC revolution has been doing some amazing things for amateur astronomers like myself. One of the biggest advances has been in the ability to take a video image of a planet and then refine that into a picture of surprising quality. The rational is that the video is grabbing images at the rate of about 30 per second, so over the period of a couple of minutes you've taken thousands of images. Of these, some are taken during moments of split-second steady seeing, those sort of moments that the observer is trained to take a mental snapshot to record those fleeting details. From there running the images through a software program allows you to align the images and retain only the most clear, stacking them into a final result that certainly seems greater than the sum of its parts!
At this point I am pretty much a hack, having purchased a simple B&W surveillance camera and aligning it behind the eyepiece of my venerable 6" Criterion reflector telescope. What has been really motivating is the results (above) from the new release of the software RegiStax. I have not been out to take images in a couple of years, partly because the results were "OK" but hardly special, and partly because it does involve some effort to get everything out and set up. The image above (a single frame on the left, final result on the right) comes from an AVI I created back in November 2003 when Saturn's rings were pretty open (they're closing up now). I never even came close to approaching this sort of detail in any of my conventional (film) astrophotography off and on over thirty years. Not only is the result very pleasing - readily showing the rings' shadow play and the gap between the A ring and B ring - but to think that it's data that's five years old! How cool is that - simply keeping the data on CD or DVD disks will allow me later to tease out images, even when my days of lugging around telescope, video camera, and tracking mount are behind me.
OK, so now I am psyched - I've got to get my 10" scope on that tracking mount so I can get some more shots this summer!
