I took this photo of Saturn and four of its moons back in 2013, when I lived in Arkansas, on a night of incredible seeing.
I captured this image by taking two exposures, one for the planet and a second for the moons, and then combining them into a single composite shot. I used a Celestron C6 SCT telescope on a CG-4 mount and an ASI120MC planetary/lunar imaging camera.
The technique for photographing planets is interesting and quite different from that used for imaging galaxies, nebulae, and so on. Instead of taking using long exposure photography, I used the ASI120MC camera to record high frame rate video of Saturn, and then used software to analyze the individual frames and identify the sharpest still images. Then, I used a free program called AutoStakkert to create a single image out of the individual frames. The resulting image is much sharper than any of the individual frames because it combines the sharpest elements of each frame into a composite image composed only of those elements.
