The Return of Saturn's Southern Rings

Saturn is back and Summer is the best time to get it cause the seeing is excellent especially before sunrise. Sadly no moons nearby which shocked me. I think Mimas was cut off to the right though. This image was taken just around dawn before the sunrise using a massive 30 inch custom dob scope. The same one I used on Venus earlier this month. Saturn is not even close to opposition but it sure is great to see its rings. I combined some Mono Data to my Color Data along with some slight IR derotated the stacks and came clean. This is now by far my best image of Saturn and the weather was spectacular. I will probably do live streams pretty soon to show everyone the capture process live so you can see it.

Videos are each 2 minute Stacks to get better cloud details. Gain was pretty much normal at around 60-70n across the board. This angle of Saturn is looking at it from the South side and the rings will thin out a tad more as we orbit closer to it so right now the rings are at its most widest of the year. The workflow was not easy but with patience and an excellent atmosphere (like I get a ton in Southern California Summers) its worth it. Saturn was around 45 degrees high on average for these takes. It should transition up to the low 50's this year. As always the hardest to get are the way inner rings but they seem to have survived the bit.

Cheers!

30" Custom DOB
3x Barlow with filter wheel
Uranus C-M
IR PASS 685
ZWO ADC

Software:
AS3-4
Lucky Stack Worker
Photoshop finish
WinJupos