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| Saturn and its moons | 5.13.2008 11:14 |
| Well, I have received my 2nd image from the Bradford Robotic Telescope (BRT). This one was of Saturn (job id: J57468, taken at 30 April 2008 22:45:07 UTC), using no filter and an exposure duration of 150 ms in order to see the dim satellites of Saturn. That long of an exposure over-exposed the planet Saturn itself a great deal, so my plan was to use another job's image of saturn with a shorter exposure time and combine the images. I have no experience doing this, nor do I have any special tools for it, so I just used "MS-Paint" and copy+pasted the image of Saturn from someone else's job (id: J58262, 35 ms exposure) that was taken about 9 days earlier (it was the closest clear one I found). Also, this image is in color. | |
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© Bradford Robotic Telescope 2008, used with permissionAgain, if your monitor brightness is turned up sufficiently, you will be able to see more detail, more specifically the dimmer moons. Of course, I was awfully curious which moons I was looking at, so I Googled for Saturn moon diagrams, and found a simple tool by Sky and Telescope, but this only showed 5 of the moons, and I saw an extra obvious moon that the tool didn't even show, which I guessed was Iapetus. So I looked for a better tool, and found this very awesome diagram generator called Saturn Viewer 2.6. It is a must see. With the generated diagram (the photo is a mirror-image, and the diagram was not), I easily determined that the visible moons were: Brightest and left-most: Titan (easily guessed) Next (going right towards Saturn): Iapetus (correctly guessed through process of elimination) Just left of the edge of the visible rings: Enceladus Above the left edge of the rings, at about the level of the top of Saturn: Rhea Tethys, Dione, and Mimas were in the overexposed region of the removed Saturn portion (see end of post), so they are not seen contrary to the generated diagram of April 30, 2008: | |
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| Reminder: the actual image is mirrored about the vertical axis due to the telescope's mirror, while the above diagram is not. Finally, here are the two images used in the combined picture: | |
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| At left is the overexposed Saturn image with moons and right is the color 35 ms image (moons too dim to see at this short of an exposure), (© Bradford Robotic Telescope 2008, used with permission). | |
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© 2008, Andrew Ging