It's been a while since my last updates. I recently moved to London, changed work, and.. changed astronomical instruments too. I'm planning to buy an ultra portable 300mm dobsonian soon, probably the best choice since I would like to travel as much as possible with it - back to Italy, or maybe to the southern skies.
But I also wanted a "quick" telescope, lightweight and simple, something that I could bring out in the garden in a very few minutes, and even better, ready for planetary imaging, so in the meantime I also bought a small Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, a Celestron Nexstar SLT 127. I also got a new camera, USB3, with very high resolution and wider field than my previous one, a ZWO ASI 178mm, still a monochrome camera, but this time with RGB filter set.
Given the smaller aperture, I'm not expecting really great shots, but my previous setup much heavier, so I spent very little time observing and shooting, which in turn means I didn't really got it to its maximum potential.
My first shooting with the new setup is a very difficult one: Saturn, in an unfavourable time, quite far away from its opposition, and very low in the UK skies.
Tiny Saturn
This is my first attempt at colour images using a RGB filters set.
Seeing mediocre/low.
Blog article: [url=http://blog.gulinux.net/blog/2016-08-10-teeny-tiny-saturn]http://blog.gulinux.net/blog/2016-08-10-teeny-tiny-saturn[/url]
Given the small aperture, and the difficult target, I can say I'm really satisfied about it. I also tried a few new softwares for image processing, particularly ImPPG, with a very handy lucy-richardson deconvolution filter, which greatly improved the image over my first processing attempt.