Mars dust storm 10/29/2005

Here is one of my images from last night. The seeing was OK (maybe 3/5). I may have to adjust my gain next time as the dust storm saturates that part of the image.

Details:
10/29/2005, 1:05am PST
Philips ToUcam Pro II, 1/33s, 10fps
10" Meade LX200 GPS, Alt/Az
3x Meade TeleXtender, UV/IR block
~700/1200 frames (approx)

Align, stack, wavelet & gamma processing in Registax 3. Crop and orient in MS digital image suite.

Thanks for looking.
Peter

Attached Image:

That's an excellent image, Peter.

The settings look very good to me - the color is right on and the dust storm does not appear to have saturated the pixels in this version. It is a very bright active region judging from the images I've seen over the last two days.

Alan

Great image Peter!

I took one last night about 23 hours later than yours and from a few miles north of you (Orange County).

Used my vintage Meade 8" 826c Newtonian, a 5x Powermate and a ToUcam Pro with an IR filter.

My question to everybody is: Is it my imagination or has this dust storm spread out a bit? It looked like there was a thin haze on the inside boundary of Sinus Sabaeus extending almost as far south as Hellas. I thought I could see this visually with both my 8" and 16" Newts but wasn't sure.

Clear skies everyone!

Jerry

Attached Image:

A great image Peter, well done.

Regards,
Ed Roach

Very nice image Peter. It captures the outbreak of the dust storm as a Brilliant swath of light just to the right (on your image) of Sinus Meridiani. A historic image. Wonderful!

Jim Phillips