Mars Approaching Opposition

November 10, 2007

Uploaded 11/11/07

  Simulated view at the time with Mars Previewer

Here is the first night out with our new DMK camera, the seeing was as usual a meager 6 arc seconds blur, however as you can see

in the raw stacked frames below, the best 200 of 600 frames each there was some details. PixInsights wavelets made a big difference

and layering HPF data in finished the processing. Visually, the disk was a jumping jumble of blurring images, with an occasional

glimpse of the polar cap, but no disk details at all.

RED Best Stacked Frames
GREEN Best Stacked Frames
BLUE Best Stacked Frames
Instrument: 12.5" f/5 with Televue 5x Powermate Barlow Platform: Astrophysics AP1200 CCD Camera: Image Source DMK 31AU03.AS Exposure: 1/15 sec 15fps Location: Payson, Arizona Elevation: 5150 ft. Sky: Seeing Average, Transparency 8/10 Outside Temperature: 45F Processing: Registax, PixInsight Pro, Photoshop CS3