Saturn with 2 moons and a capture discovery

 

Here's a thoughtfully processed composite with moon's above the rings.

 

 

 

The animation is a bit difficult to see Tethys so I bumped up the brightness.

https://i.imgur.com/hiGVxGu.mp4

 

 

Having extra time to setup before your subject arrives is always dangerous. In this case Saturn was set for a showing after 1230 local time, because of trees. Having more time, I decided to do a proper star test with the new secondary holder and spider. In doing so I noticed similar issues to what I've seen in the past that manifested themselves as though I still had astigmatism. Being very disappointed, I decided to turn a few Firecapture settings on and off. Much to my surprise I noticed it actually impacted the results

 

I'm not really sure what made me want to try to turn auto-align off but you can see the results for yourself right here. It's quite striking. My theory, the camera I'm using has some sort of rolling shutter and it as the image is centered in software it creates artifacts that are very bad.

 

With auto-align on

 

 

 

After turning off auto-align

 

 

Same star, same scope, camera, settings only a few minutes apart.

 

 

Oddly I did a similar test on Saturn and didn't really see much difference.

 

 

With auto-align on

 

 

 

After turning off auto-align

 

 

My camera does have a rolling shutter - https://www.flir.com/products/blackfly-s-usb3?vertical=machine+vision&segment=iis

 

Just a word to the wise, the stellar collimation tests made a big difference in my opinion.

 

Thoughts?