Astrophotography Adventure - Saturn With Registax

In the prior Adventure, truly disappointing pictures of Saturn sent me back to the drawing board.  But, after another adjustment, I got some pretty clear, in-focus pictures of the Moon.  The major adjustment was focusing through the camera, rather than the eyepiece, and using my glasses.  In retrospect, those are a couple of really obvious things to overlook, but overlook them I did. But that's why astrophotography is a lot of trial and error. So, it was time to go back to Saturn and see whether I could improve on the previous poor images I captured.  And what an improvement!  In order to really see whether I was in focus, I needed to boost the magnification I was getting through NightCap Pro. I ended up somewhere between 5x and 7x magnification and that made the image big enough to actually see how well it was in focus.  So here is probably the best single image I got:

Not great but not too bad.  Seeing was pretty poor that evening - we have been getting a lot of haze from the terrible forest fire in Alberta here in the Northeast.  So, all things considered, an OK image.

Since I was pretty happy with the clarity and focus of what I was seeing through the camera, I also decided to see what results I could get taking a video and then using Registax to stack the best individual video frames into an image for me. So, I ended up taking a 17 second .mov video of Saturn using the NightCap Pro video feature. 

As you can see, the picture does jump around quite a bit, but that was really my fault as I was still fiddling with the camera while the it was taking the video. The first problem I encountered is that Registax only uses .avi formatted video files.  So, after a little research on the interwebs, I decided to get PIPP (Planetary Imaging Pre-Processor) which will convert .mov files to .avi files for you. PIPP can be downloaded for free and it is a pretty useful tool.  It has some nice default options for optimizing its output for planetary, solar, and lunar videos.  Having converted the .mov to .avi, you can then use the .avi as the input for Registax.  I really just used the standard defaults but if you'd like a pretty clear tutorial on the basics of using Registax, take a look at this link.  In any case, here are the results I got:

Considering the poor seeing, I am pretty happy with the result.  I would be great to get a bit more resolution but I'm not sure whether is need to bring down the ISO some more or whether this was as good as I was going to get in such poor viewing conditions. But that's something I'll find out on another night.