Contains:  Solar system body or event

Image of the day 12/16/2022

Lunar Occultation of Mars on December 8th, 2022, Ethan Chappel

Lunar Occultation of Mars on December 8th, 2022

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Image of the day 12/16/2022

Lunar Occultation of Mars on December 8th, 2022, Ethan Chappel

Lunar Occultation of Mars on December 8th, 2022

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

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.

Alternate version with Mars processed independently.

Comments

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    Lunar Occultation of Mars on December 8th, 2022, Ethan Chappel
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Histogram

Lunar Occultation of Mars on December 8th, 2022, Ethan Chappel