Saturnian Moons

Here is my first color image of Saturn. It was taken at 9:50pm Eastern on March 2, 2008 (01:50UTC March 3rd). Seeing was better than average for around here, but not as good as it gets. One thing that continues to amaze me are the colors of Saturn. It seems to be a transition from the Jovian reds and browns to the Uranian and Neptunian blues and greens. The rings of Saturn continue to flatten as we approach the ring plane crossing in 2010. Also in this image are four of Saturn's numerous moons: Rhea, Dione, Tethys, and Enceladus. The moons were very faint in the individual frames of the AVI and RegiStax could not maintain tracking lock and align them separately from Saturn. So, they have a slightly oblong shape. The large stack size reduced the noise by a factor of 40 and allowed me to pull the moons out of the noise. You've gotta love these WebCams! Mimas was just out of frame and probably too dim to cleanly separate from the noise.

Details:
Telescope C-11 at ~f/20 (~5300mm fl given the observed diameter in pixels)
TIS DBK31AF03.AS color WebCam with an IR/UV blocking filter
Exposure 1/11 seconds (7.5 fps for a total time of 6 minutes 13 seconds)
Gain 880
Brightness 225 (critical in bringing out Enceladus)
Best 1600 out of 2800 frames (MAP) aligned and stacked in RegiStax
Minor wavelet processing
Curves adjustment in PhotoShop

Corrected the date and added the UTC time.