This is my best photograph of Saturn so far. I took it through my homemade Lurie-Houghton telescope the evening of 24 December 2001. The seeing was only fair that night so I'm hoping for some even better images in the future.
For the black and white image, I used a Logitech Quickcam VC web-cam type of camera along with a 2.4X Vernonscope barlow lens. The Lurie-Houghton's focal length and f-ratio is 1154mm at f/4.63. The complete setup is like using a 2770mm f/11.1 lens. I used Maxim DL to average a few exposures together and Adobe Photoshop to crop and apply some unsharp masking to finish the image processing.
For the color image, I used a color photograph taken with my Olympus D-620L digital camera used with an afocal connection to the Lurie-Houghton Telescope. This image wasn't very sharp due to poor focusing, but it did contain useful color information. I used Photoshop to scale and rotate the color image to match the B&W image, then converted it to LAB color mode. I also converted the B&W image to LAB mode. I then copy the L channel from the B&W image and pasted it over the L channel of the color image. By doing this the sharpness of the B&W image can be applied to the color image to create the result seen in the above color photograph. Photograph by Rick Scott.
Updated: 26 January 2002