My Mars - 09/11/2005

[Hitchhiker]

Had a go at imaging Mars last night even though seeing was really terrible.

Equipment: 10" LX200GPS with 2X Barlow and LPI.

Mars3 was 425 images processed in Registax following Mike's tutorial. Mars4 was 500 images processed in the same way. Went pretty hard on the processing and turned out a lot better than I thought it would given the seeing.

Used a Hartmann mask for the first time to achieve focus (kept on forgetting to take it off, too! :doh: )

[atalas]

Nice detail Adam ,well done .

[davidpretorius]

good stuff, try backing off some of the wavelets settings when you get the white ring around the outside of the planet.

also, try mitchell resampling at 2x or even 4 x. I find you get more range with the wavelets and then you can always shrink it back down to get your final image

when resampling, make sure all the images are centralized, if there is no tracking, it c.t.s (ie cracks the sh....).

[asimov]

Thats pretty good hitchhiker.

[gaa_ian]

Thats great Adam, a good representation of what I saw visually tonight.
I love shots that show what you will actually see, when looking through the eyepiece !

[[1ponders]]

Nice shots Adam. I think you've done a dam fine job.

Btw if someone sees you using the hartmann mask and you forget to take it off, you tell them its an apperture mask to help cut the brightness :D

[RB]

Not bad at all Adam,

I like the 2nd one better. I agree that it looks very similar to the view throu the eyepiece.

Well done.

Don't feel bad about forgeting the hartman mask on, I spent 10 minutes one night trying to focus on the moon using my 80ED with no luck !!!!!
Earlier in the day I was imaging the sun and had forgotten the solar filter in the front.
At least my eye was safe.

:doh: :stupid: :lol:

[iceman]

ROFL Andrew nice one!

Great shots Adam, nice mars! If you'd like, send me a zip of your bmp's/avi's, and I can have a go at processing them in registax to see what comes out!

What resolution are you using with the LPI?

With a 2x barlow on a 2500mmFL scope I would've expected a bit larger image scale..?

[Hitchhiker]

Thanks everyone for your positive comments. :)

davidpretorius, I'll give Mitchell resampling a try and back off the wavelets (I actually kind of understand what wavelets are!). I thought the white ring around the planet might have been me overprocessing an image taken with poor seeing.

Mike, I'll take you up on your offer. I'll try and zip up my images tonight at home and send them to you (though it looks like clear skies tonight - I'll try to get them to you this weekend ;) ) No pressure though, I'm sure you have a few other things you need to be doing! I have to thank you for getting me this far as I followed your Registax instructions - I didn't think there was that much detail in the images I took. It was great comparing my image to Mars Previewer II and seeing the features that were supposed to be there!

What resolution am I using with the LPI? If you're asking if I'm using 2x2 binning or some other strange digital imaging technique, then the answer is 'I don't think so'! I'm just capturing all images from the Autostar Envisage application - I'm not letting Envisage do any combining or any other processing (though maybe I'd better have a closer look at the settings):confuse3:

As far as image scale goes I am using a 10" LX200 with a 2.5 m FL with a 2X barlow - this should give me a 5m FL. A 20 arcsec object (Mars) imaged by a 5m FL system should give an image size of 0.5mm at the focal plane. An image 0.5 mm wide on the LPI with 8 micron pixels should cover about 63 pixels. In my image I measured about 71 pixels so with the inevitable error introduced by my white ring I think I'm in the ball park. Does this make sense - I don't have too much experience as far as astrophotography goes - I could have made a glaring error!

[iceman]

Hi Adam.
Here's my reprocess of your Mars3 and Mars4 avi's.

Again, there isn't any evidence that you did anything obviously wrong. I used Registax and AstraImage to get the images above. The left column is after wavelet processing in registax, and the right column is after AstraImage processing.

The top row is Mars3 and the bottom row is Mars4.

You did a good job with your images and you should be proud!

[ving]

great stuff adam :)
mars aint a dead target yet! :)

[iceman]

David this was from November :)

[davidpretorius]

nice processing work mike!

[ving]

mike... I mean great work mike! :ashamed:

gee i miss alot to threads!