This is an attempt at imaging Saturn with the UR Mees telescope in Naples, NY - my neighborhood observatory. I and a fellow tour guide, Kevin Lyons, stayed on after a tour to see what could be done with a planetary target. The Mees is a 24 inch Cassegrain reflector with a focal ratio of f13.5 (i.e. it's slow) and a focal length of 2134mm. This scope was built in the days when inches were still accepted in physics departments - it's really an 84" focal length. I'm told that the telescope and its digital camera aren't good for planetary work, and I don't understand why. I suppose more magnification would help.

We used Kevin's ZWO camera for this, not the UR camera mounted on the telescope. We inserted the camera into the optical eyepiece mount.

It was a windy night with high and low clouds blowing around the sky; overall seeing was poor. Kevin did the processing of the several thousand video frames that we took and the result is way better than I expected. Saturn's rings are edge on to the Earth at the moment, and will be for several years to come, so it's not as colorful and dramatic is it will be when it's more inclined.

We'll try again if UR lets us have a slot during the next student break. It's a new instrument for both of us - every session things will be better and we get a little more skillful.