Jupiter and Saturn

Object data: Jupiter and Saturn were recorded on the night of 19/20 December 2001 from southern France. Date: 19/12/01 Location: Southern France Conditions: 19/12/01: calm, transparency=9, seeing=7 Optics: RCOS Ritchey-Chretien 12.5" f/9 working at about f/45 with eyepiece projection (17mm Plossl eyepiece) Mount: AP 900 GTO on Portable Pier Camera: SBIG ST-8E / CFW-8 Guiding: N/A Exposure: RGB: Red: 0.04s, Green: 0.04s, Blue: 0.08s Processing: Image acquisition and combining were done using Maxim CCD/DL, mild deconvolution was applied in AIP. Some final 'tweaks' were done in Photoshop. Notes: The Jetstream analysis indicated that the seeing should be very good and it did appear good through the eyepiece. I visually judged the seeing to be just over 2 arc seconds, however later analysis of CCD images showed it to be around 3 arc seconds. I took sequences of 36 RGB images of each planet. These were my first attempts at CCD imaging of planets and I underexposed them by some margin, resulting in excessive noise. This was especially true of Saturn - this image comprises a stack of three of each of the best RGB images (to reduce noise), hence it is a little less sharp than it could have been. The sharpest RGBs would have yielded a sharper looking result, but at the expense of much more noise. The above images are not to scale - the Saturn image has been upscaled by about 50%