Mars (12 October 2020) LRGB (rdk_CA)

Contains: Solar system body or event

Mars (12 October 2020) LRGB

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Mars (12 October 2020) LRGB

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

This image of Mars was acquired near opposition, on 12 October 2020. At that time, Mars was at a visual magnitude of -2.6 and at a distance of 0.417 AU from Earth. Mars was at an altitude of 55 deg. above the horizon for this session.

It took me several tries to get my recipe for this planet correct before getting this result. Over the summer I had good success with a OSC camera taking images of Jupiter and Saturn. For Mars, however, most of the surface detail was washed out with the color camera. I made a second attempt a week later, having adjusted my collimation, but still without success. I then ended up making my first attempt at LRGB planetary imaging. I tried several IR high-pass filters for the L channel, and eventually decided to use the data from the IR 610 nm filter.

The pixel size on the IMX178 monochrome sensor is quite small (only 2.4 microns), and given the seeing conditions, I decided not to use a Barlow lens. The brighter image enabled me to operate the camera at a lower gain setting (173 on the ZWO camera) and higher frame rate, which I think helped to improve the image quality. For each channel I acquired 18000 frames at a rate of ~150 frames/s over a 2 min. interval for each. I then stacked the best 25% of the frames in each data set. Finally, I used WinJUPOS to correct for the planet's rotation. Of course, there is still much that could be improved here, but overall I was finally satisfied with this result. The Syrtis Major Planum (near the planned landing site for NASA's Mars 2020 mission) can be seen as a prominent feature in the Northern hemisphere, just left of center in this image.

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