Despite a raging Jetstream overhead and something similar at ground level (well 30+ mph winds), I headed out hoping to get an image Mars with Syrtis Major in view to improve on the ones that I captured back in November. The seeing wasn't as bad as I anticipated, but the wind was horrendous with the C14 + dew shield bouncing around on the normally rock solid AP1200 mount. It was a devil of the job keeping Mars on the sensor, within the ROI, so I increased the ROI a couple of times to see if that helped, but I still kept losing Mars off screen. I tried a 1 min run, but reverted to my normal 6 mins and captured a few SERs at different ROIs.
When I came to process them, AS3! seemed to like the sharp edges where Mars slipped out of the ROI. I tried several different alignment points and stack numbers, but AS3! wouldn't have it, so I decided to try to quality crop the SERs in PIPP. At first that didn't work well, but I eventually found a way to select best 30k frames from each SER and whilst at it crop the ROI of each video to the same 300px x 300px size. I then ran these through AS3! for best 10k frames, followed by wavelets in Registax6, then de-rotated the best 2 consecutive SER/TIFFs in WinJupos. Further wavelets in Registax, then into Affinity Photo for final levels, saturation/vibrance adjustments and resized from 96dpi to 144dpi resulting in this image.
Mars is now only 15" diameter and 98% phase. The polar hood largely seems to have disappeared.
I'm not sure if it is any better than, (or even as good as) my attempt for this aspect of
Mars 25 Nov 2022, but I'm pleased to have salvaged something from the very challenging conditions.
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