Ralph Megna and Walt Lickteig are two amateur astronomers that have recently joined our beta test group. They have been ardent planetary imagers for some time and have spent some time trying out the Starfish (Monochrome) Camera on one of my favorite subjects - Saturn. Above is the results of their first imaging session and some of Ralph's comments about the camera:

"Here is our first light image of Saturn.

What blows me away about this image is that it is a stack of only 63 frames. Its smoothness and detail would normally require 250+ frames from a webcam. The seeing was a big help — there are very, very few nights when you can use two out of three frames shot — but the extraordinary lack of noise from the camera was a major factor, too. With scope collimation perfectly tweaked and the ability to capture more images in a shorter time, I think this camera could do some amazing planetary imaging (god, I wish I could have used it this past fall on Mars!)."

Ralph

Above is an imaging experiment performed by Ralph on the same image.
"I took our image of Saturn and increased its size by a series of small bicubic enlargements. In the attached, it is more than 2X its original size. The presence of detail (and its preservation after enlargement) is pretty amazing."

Ralph

I'd like to thank Ralph and Walt for sharing this image with us and encourage them to keep up the good work!

Bob