Mars September 22 2005

Finally, after travelling for work the last couple of weeks I'm back home and the weather has started to clear up... I've been hanging out to have a go at Mars so I stayed up late last night.

Conditions ended up as very poor, high haze and a bright nearby moon - only about a dozen stars were visible across the whole sky. Mars was at about 45 degrees altitude and the moon was even lower at about 30 degrees (only just clearing the trees!).

The seeing was reasonably stable but the haze robbed me of a lot of light so I had to use longer exposures.

Overall I'd rate the imaging conditions as 2 - 2.5 / 10. Not good, but I had a go anyway.

The result was not so bad, there's some cloud formations visible near the centre of the disc, the NPH can be seen, the SPC is visible.

The low quality of the raw frames meant I had to process it really hard, apologies to the purists :-)

Details:

10" f/6 newtonian
5x powermate + extender for effective 6x
PGR Dragonfly Express camera, 640x480 16bpp monochrome
Astronomik R,G,B filters
R=G=33ms B=66ms
Captured with Coriander for Linux, processed in Registax, Astra Image
and the GIMP for Windows.

regards, Anthony

Attached Image:

Hi Anthony,

great to see your new DF-express performing so well. Considering the conditions the image came out crisp and clear. Hope you have some good seeing soon so that the camera can stretch it's muscles.
How many frames did you stack for each color channel ?

Best regards,
Oliver

Here is an image from about 1 hour earlier, captured at 15fps for all channels. I was having real probems with haze stealing light from my camera.

The lower fps results in a lower noise image, but not as much detail.

regards, Anthony

Attached Image:

Hello,



Nice images.


Kirk

Your images are exceptionally nice. Thanks for posting.

Russell

Hi Anthony,

Very nice images, what range of FPS is available with the PGR Dragonfly Express.

Thanks,

Wes Higgins