Receding Mars 23 Jul

[Sebbie (Sebastian)]

Imaged Mars around 8pm this evening with both ASI MC120 and DFK 21AU618. Here's one of the best ASI captures taken at f40: 1200 frame AS stack followed by RS wavelets, AI deconvolution, noise reduction, white balance and tone adjustments.

Conditions were cold (only 2 degrees which is not uncommon this time of the year in Canberra), seeing variable with intermittent high level cloud crisscrossing the sky. Reasonable detail is still visible on tiny 8" disk, will try to compare this effort with DFK avis in the coming days.

Thanks for looking,
Sebastian

[astro744]

Very nice indeed! Reminds me of the view through the Oddie 9" f15 refractor many years ago. The image is very natural and 'telescopic' in appearance; you processed it very well!

[Sebbie (Sebastian)]

Thanks astro744, I like the ASI MC but find it harder to operate (primarily due to FireCapture UI - too many fiddly settings for my liking ). I am always struggling to get the white balance correct with the debayer on.. slide bars are difficult to control and position of the settings window cannot be altered on top of the preview screen.. sigh

Here's what the DFK gave me half an hour earlier with Mars slightly higher in the sky. I've used the same acquisition / processing parameters as for January Mars captures:

http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...37#post1052637

(60 fps at f40, drizzle stack of best 1100 frames). Wavelets are a bit stronger than in the ASI image.

I must say I like Sony CCD better when it comes to colour reproduction (vibrance and saturation).