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View Full Version here: : Fear and Dread stalk the night skies in Brisbane


Dennis
09-09-2020, 04:01 PM
From:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/mars-moons/overview/?page=0&per_page=40&order=name+asc&search=&condition_1=6%3Aparent_id&condition_2=moon%3Abody_type%3Ailik e

"Asaph Hall was about to give up his frustrating search for a Martian moon one August night in 1877, but his wife Angelina urged him on. He discovered Deimos the next night, and Phobos six nights after that. Ninety-four years later, NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft got a much better look at the two moons from its orbit around Mars."

I managed to image these two diminutive moons of Mars from my back garden in Brisbane, around 2:00am on 9th Sept 2020.

Phobos means fear and Deimos means dread. Fitting names for the sons of a war god.:)

The seeing was very poor (I could not make out the 4 craterlets on the floor of Plato on our rising Moon) and Mars was literally wobbling like a jelly and this produced “onion ring” artefacts in the LRGB Frames I acquired.

I have overlaid my LRGB image over the blown-out disc of Mars, which I had to grossly over expose in order to register the much fainter moons. I am confident in the mag 10.62 field star and Deimos, but much less confident in Phobos, as it may well be an seeing artefact that has been stretched in processing.:shrug:

I will have to wait for better conditions to be reasonably confident of recording Phobos.:)

Tak Mewlon 180 F11.5, Tak x1.6 Extender, ASI290MM Camera. I have uploaded a Screen Capture from SkyTools 4 Imaging to provide some information on these faint suckers.

Cheers

Dennis

multiweb
09-09-2020, 04:35 PM
Excellent detective work! :thumbsup: