New Infrared Blocking Filter

Received an infrared blocking filter on Friday, and waited for the first clear day to try it out.  I really wanted to try photographing the moon, but being it is waning, it rises too late now.  Saturn has always been difficult for me, so I figured I'd try Saturn again with the filter.

The transparency was bad, but the planet was visible.  I couldnt detect too much variation with the seeing.  As always, the haze illuminated the area around the planet, and as you can see from the various images the rings are not very well defined.  However, take a peek at the body of the planet.  It seems there is much more contrast with the IR block filter installed in the camera.

This is the result of the stacking (198 frames).

After some green removal in photoshop, then some wavelet sharpening, and the elimination of the gray background in iris, this is what I came up with.

I  then thought about splitting the RGB by saving the image as a .fit, loading each in Gimp and converting each to a jpg.  The results of the 3 monochrome images representing each of the colors is presented here:

This is the red channel

This is the green channel

This is the blue channel

Notice how dark the NEB appears in each of these images.  I dont think I have ever resolved the NEB to this extent without the filter.  It will be interesting as to the effect of the filter on the moon and other planets when I'm able to photograph them.