Had a good Mars session last night/this morning getting my best Mars pic to date. Conditions were OK with no clouds and no wind, but seeing was no good on Jupiter over to the west. Mars was OK though. Only problems were the heavy dew again and Mars being very close to the bright moon. The hairdryer did a good job defogging the mirrors and lenses on several occasions- thanks Andrew for the tip. On view was the south polar ice cap up the top, and cloud cover was visible over the mare acidalium region down the bottom. Off to the left side is sinus meridiani, Chryse region central, and aurorae sinus area over on the right. Got about a dozen more 5 minute videos to go through taken from 11:30 till about 3am.
Another from this morning, slight improvement by using a different video and stacking a smaller percentage of frames. Stacked 12% for this one. Some cloud visible over Mare Acidalium. Enlarged 150%.
Best I could get last night, it really was a strange night. First the seeing was OK but Mars was too low, like looking through a mirage. Waited a while for it to get higher and it improved, but was still shimmering. That's when I got this one, but it wasn't high enough yet so I waited longer. Then when the height was about right, my mirror fogged up. Had to de-fog with the hair dryer. Then had to wait for the scope to stabalize again. When it was good to go again, the clouds/fog came in and I couldn't see a thing and that was it for the night. At least I got something anyway. Can just make out Syrtis Major and Hellas. Hoping for tonight to be better but 100% humidity forecast again- that means heavy dew again.
Hi Nick, these are pretty decent shots despite the various challenges. Have you tried the wavelet sharpening in Registax? The image data might yield even more detail
Hi Mirko, yes I use the wavelets but I don't know if I'm doing it right. I just try to get them as good as I can. Mostly using layers 1 and 2 for Mars, I move layer 1 slider right to the end, then sharpen till it looks like I've gone a bit too far. Then denoise till it smoothes out, and similar for layer 2. Sometimes I can get a bit more detail but it blows out the ice cap and the edge. I'll keep playing around with it. I know I can get better quality video than what the last image came from.
Wanted to get Syrtis Major again last night but it was clouded out, so I got some sleep and got up early. Syrtis Major was gone but conditions were very good. I wish I could get seeing conditions like this a bit more often. Mars about an hour ago: