I received requests from multiple directions to increase the brightness of Mars. Part of the reason I decided against it initially was that keeping it dim concealed the noise and blur from stacking just 100 frames. However, I was curious what could be done with compositing so ended up processing Mars separately using the first 1-minute recording of the event and placed it in all the images.
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It was questionable whether the sky would be clear for this event, but it was good enough to catch some images in the early stages of the occultation. The big question going in was how tolerant AutoStakkert would be of Mars moving relative to the Moon. After some experimentation, I determined 100 frames was the most it could reliably stack without smearing Mars, corresponding to 0.18 seconds of video.
My location was near the edge of the path, so Mars scraped along the southern hemisphere of the Moon and fully disappeared for only a few minutes. Within that brief time the sky went from mostly clear to fully overcast. I saw a few moments of re-emergence with the camera's gain maxed out, but nothing that can be processed into an image. Some friends who set up south of me were completely clouded out and missed the entire occultation.
Flat frames were used to remove dust motes from the raw data since they were inevitable when using the full sensor. I am used to doing this for deep sky imaging but have never tried it for planetary or lunar imaging before tonight.
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