There was some decent seeing tonight in Whittier. I'm glad I took advantage of it. I got some pretty good captures of Saturn. I was intending to grab a bit of Saturn and then switch rigs to capture Andromeda but, I forgot what a waste of time it is to try to capture a planet under 40° in my sky. I was getting some pretty blurry shots until the Planet reached about 41° and then things started to improve that I decided to dedicate the night to Saturn. I'll pull out the wide-field scope next week for some deep-sky madness.

If you're using FireCapture, there is this really neat tool I recently started to use called Focus Help. It displays a graph that measures the edges of a planet to give you some visual feedback on your focus. It's really hard to determine if you are in good focus when capturing a planet like Saturn, especially when the rings are edge-on like it is now. This tool evaluates the edges of the planet and gives you a percentage graph that helps determine how well focused you are. I still haven't mastered the auto focusing features in SharpCap or The Sky X so this does the trick.

Here are a couple of shots of Saturn from tonights session.

Saturn - October 18, 2025

Saturn - October 18, 2025