I have been chasing this planet for a very long time. Saturn is the most beautiful planet in the Solar System and yet I haven’t been able to photograph it properly. This is mainly caused by the fact that in the last years this planet had very low southern declination (it has been quite close to the horizon). Therefore, I was not able to capture it from home, and during my travels, to southern places, I never had a suitable telescope with me. Finally, I got an opportunity. I was in the southern hemisphere, specifically in Namibia, and I rented Meade 10″ Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. The first night I photographed Centarus A Galaxy. Early in the morning around 4 a.m. I came to park to scope, but before that, I removed the ASI071 camera. Focal length 3130 mm I prolonged by TeleVue 2.5 Barlow lens to nearly 8 m, attached ZWO ASI485, and captured 2000 frames. Then I selected 25% best frames and here we go:
| Telescope | Meade 10" |
| Aperture | 254 mm |
| Focal length | 7825 mm |
| Mount | MK 100K |
| Autoguiding | non |
| Camera | ZWO ASI485MC |
| Corrector | TeleVue Barlow 2.5x |
| Filters | non |
| Exposure | 2000x180ms, Gain 222, 25% selected, |
| Date | 2022-05-28 |
[…] As you can see, I gave up on the Newtonian portable telescope and replaced it with a refractor. The reason is that I bought a new camera for this trip. Specifically, ZWO ASI 2600MM, which has very small pixels. I was not able to get the stars round at the edges even with a perfectly collimated telescope, no matter which coma corrector I used. I simply gave up and ordered SharpStar 94 EPDH with a focal reducer. I sacrificed the aperture, but the stars are small and round in any corner of an APS-C sensor. I also took the portable refractor WO RedCat 51, combined with ZWO ASI 071MC. I wanted to rent the Newtonian telescope at Kiripotib, but it was already booked, so the only option was to rent Meade 10″ ACF. Stefan helped me to set it up and I used this scope mainly for galaxies like NGC 5128 Centaurus A Galaxy or NGC 6744 Galaxy or the planet Saturn. […]