Saturn via Webcam

I went out on the 26th February to try and get the best out of Saturn, when it was at it’s largest for the year. I began imaging with my Philips SPC900 web cam straight onto my LX200 10″ telescope.

I spent the most time trying to get the best possible focus I could on the planet, and below is the best image I could get after I ran it through Registax on fully automatic processing. I took the footage in VLounge and played heavily with the webcams settings in the program before capture.

Just so you can get an idea of the original webcam video I took, this image was created from the video below:

I also took some video using my webcam together with my Meade 2x Barlow the only problem was that the magnification was too much and getting a good focus was not possible, plus Saturn filled the whole webcam chip.

If I had the chance to do it all again, I think I would add on my f6 focal reducer and then use the Meade 2x Barlow which should have given me an intermediate sized planet to image and one which I hopefully could get focus on.