Saturn with a telephoto lens

Hi all,
Ever thought of photographing the planets with your telephoto lens?
In the next couple of weeks, all 5 naked-eye planets will be visible at
the same time (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).

Here is my Saturn try using a 500 mm f/4 telephoto lens, stacked
1.4 and 2x teleconverters and Canon 10D camera on a stationary tripod.
Exposures were 1/20 second at f/11.2 (wide open), iso 200.

I registered and stacked 99 images out of
about 150, and improved resolution using a Richardson-Lucy adaptive
iteration method. I also tried traditional photoshop unsharp
masking to improve the image. The iterative restoration worked much
better. I'm now experimenting with this method on wildlife and landscape
photos. Here are the results for Saturn (with more details on methods):

http://clarkvision.com/astro/saturn.03.02.2004

Adding 99 images improves signal-to-noise about 10x, allowing one to bring
out detail not possible in a single frame.

Roger Clark