Mars this morning Feb 11th from Melbourne

[John K]

Some amazing images being posted of Mars on IIS.

The disturbance identified by Stefan - I think it is shown on this image as the darker than normal region in Arcadia at 5 o'clock of Olympus Mons from the centre of the disk - particularly in IR.

Poor conditions this morning due to the smoke in Melbourne.

John K.

[Maurice]

Nice image John. When I saw all the smoke in the sky this morning from the fires I didn't even bother to get up.
I think that you have done very well considering the conditions.
Any further thoughts on the ASI camera?
I find Firecapture very intuitive and really easy to use; what do you think so far?

Cheers
Maurice

[John K]

Thanks Maurice,

I think the ASI camera delivers nice high frame rates but I find I have to stack more frames then with my Skynix - so it's good for bright objects like Mars, particularly in variable seeing. I am not sure about it on Solar yet - in terms of the Moon, at the 1260 resolution, I cannot get it to go above 22fps even though it's speced at 35.

Firecapture is easy to use but I still have some bugs with it - I seem to have to reinstall my filter wheel quite a few times and also it freezes up on me when I change the resolution - perhaps it's my laptop.

But overall, it's certainly adds nicely to my arsenal.

What we need is a USB 3 low noise camera with similar frame rates!

John K.

[Maurice]

Have you tried to change the USB traffic setting in Firecapture?
It defaults to 40, but you get increased frame rates if you take it up to 70 or so. Just check how stable your system is at that throughput.
You can access the tab for changing this under the exposure/gain slider by clicking the dropdown menu next to the settings icon (gear wheel) symbol

Cheers
Maurice

[John K]

Thanks Maurice - I just checked mine - it was at 64 -so will crank it up to 70 and see what happens!