Mars with Dust Storm

[Saturnine (Jeff)]

Hi All

Imaged Mars on Saturday night under reasonably good conditions, Pickering 6. Maybe not the last for the season but the planet is getting smaller quite quickly. Managed to capture the region, Chryse and Valles Marineris with the new dust storm filling the Valles in a brighter yellow / orange hue, almost in the centre of the disc iin the images.
Was only using my 6" newt , so resolution isn't that good.

150mm f8 Skywatcher newt, HEQ5, 2.5X Powermate, ZWO290mc.
Best 2,000 of 10,000, PIPP and Registax .

[PKay (Peter)]

Once again a great result Jeff.

What will you do when Mars goes away?

[AdamJL]

Wow wow wow! How cool is it to see a dust storm, fantastic

[Saturnine (Jeff)]

Thanks for the comments fellas'. Hope to get a few more sessions in the next few weeks before it gets too small for detail.

Originally Posted by PKay

Once again a great result Jeff.

What will you do when Mars goes away?

Guess I'll have to resort to imaging Sol and Luna until next Jupiter season, at least the Sun seems to coming back to life with an increase in activity in the past few months. It's either that or I'll have to lower my standards and resort to Deep Sky Imaging and visual observing, which I really enjoy by the way.
No lack of things to do, could do some mods to the scopes, finish some half done projects, clean the mirrors in the newts, etc etc.

[LostInSp_ce]

Great grab Jeff! The storms are back.

[PKay (Peter)]

So Jeff, here is a challenge.

With your skills of 'zooming in', why not try for a feint galaxy?

NGC1531 is high an dry at the moment.

I have about 6 hrs on it so far.

Give it a go!

[Saturnine (Jeff)]

Hi Peter
An interesting challenge and one I've thought about from time to time, to really push the camera and explore it's limitations.
The biggest problems would be that the camera is not cooled and from "home" I can only see about 2 / 3 hours of R.A. due to surrounding brickwork. Nothing is impossible though.


And now that planet season is drawing to a close some more time can be allocated to imaging other things.
Actually I have dabbled with the 290mc on a few brighter DS targets , with interesting results.

Originally Posted by PKay

So Jeff, here is a challenge.

With your skills of 'zooming in', why not try for a feint galaxy?

NGC1531 is high an dry at the moment.

I have about 6 hrs on it so far.

Give it a go!

[multiweb (Marc)]

That looks really good. It's getting smaller very quickly now. I did some IR on it the other night and noticed it had shrunk a fair bit. I don't know yet if I've picked up any dust. I have a big backlog of stuff to go through.