Contains:  Solar system body or event
Mars - 18 Oct 2022, Geof Lewis

Mars - 18 Oct 2022

Revision title: Later stack

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

On a night of poor seeing I waited for Mars to gain some elevation, not expecting much, but as it would be only my 2nd attempt for Mars this apparation and with the new colour camera, I wanted to establish some working capture setting in FireCapture hopefully for better conditions in the coming weeks. I was right about the seeing, with Mars like a boiling tomato about to explode, but whilst I was playing around, I had a brief period around 1:45am-2:00am (BST) when the seeing improved allowing me to capture this image. It is the best 1000 frames from 75,000 captured during a 6 min SER at 5ms (200fps). Just fairly light wavelets in Registax, as it wouldn't take anything more, then final saturation and levels tweaks in Affinity Photo. I resized to 192dpi for a smoother finish and a larger image for publiaction. It's nothing to right home about, but Mars is still a long way away, displaying a disc of <14 arcsecs, so hopefully better is to come. The dark triangular of Syrtis Major is central with the huge circular impact basin Hellas Plantia towards the south. Blue clouds and ice are also seen at the north pole. At the time of this capture Mars was at an elevation of 44°, so I kept going for another hour hoping that the seeing would improve again as Mars gained greater altitude, but even with Mars in the mid 50s° elevation, it was not to be.

Comments

Revisions

  • Mars - 18 Oct 2022, Geof Lewis
    Original
  • Mars - 18 Oct 2022, Geof Lewis
    B
  • Final
    Mars - 18 Oct 2022, Geof Lewis
    C

B

Title: Annotated version

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C

Title: Later stack

Description: Stack of best 5000 frames from each of a series of 4 videos covering a total elapsed time of just over 1 hour.

Uploaded: ...

Histogram

Mars - 18 Oct 2022, Geof Lewis

In these collections

Planets - Mars