Mars on a night of reasonable seeing

The seeing is the determining factor as to whether it is possible to capture reasonably good planetary images.

The Jet stream is one of the main culprits for ruining the seeing in the UK. on the evening of November 3rd the Jet stream was out of the way for a while, resulting in reasonable seeing.

The UK can be seen on the map between two high-velocity Jet stream zones.

As a result, the seeing was reasonable, and detail could be seen on Mars as the following capture movie shows.

Mars

Click on an image to get a closer view

Syrtis Major is clearly visible, and could be seen like this on the computer screen.

An 8" SCT was fitted with a x2 Barlow and an SVBONY SV305 camera so that Mars could be imaged at f/20.

Nicola's AstroDMx Capture for Windows was used to capture a SER file of a Region of Interest of 480 x 480 pixels. The ROI function in AstroDMx Capture was used to keep the planet in the centre of the ROI for the 5 min duration of the capture. The result was a 34825 frame SER file.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for Windows capturing the SER file of Mars

The best 30% of the frames in the SER file were stacked in Autostakkert!, wavelet processed in Registax 5.1 and post processed in the Gimp 2.10 and Affinity Photo.

The resulting image of Mars

A number of features are clearly visible, including Syrtis Major, Syrtis Minor, Sinus Sabaeus, the Helas region and the south polar cap (at the top).

This session was a pre-release imaging session for AstroDMx Capture for Windows, to look for and fix any remaining issues. The release of the software is now imminent.

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin