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Old 18-05-2016, 08:40 PM
Dennis
Dazzled by the Cosmos.

Dennis is offline
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Brisbane
Posts: 11,827
Mars, Phobos & Deimos, Brisbane 15th May 2016

More with hope than confidence, I set up on Sunday night, 15th May to see if I could record the two moons of Mars; Phobos and Deimos.

I expected Deimos to be fairly straightforward, lying some 60 arc secs from Mars but, Phobos would only be 24 arc sec distant, bathed in the glare of the Martian disc.

The seeing was very good and when the results came in, Deimos was unmistakable and I had a few grains of light as a promising candidate for Phobos.

After much histogram stretching in ImagesPlus 6 and AstroArt 6, I was able to get everything to “pop out” in one aligned/stacked frame, including 4 field stars.

Mewlon 180 F12, TeleVue x2 PowerMate, Atik 414EX CCD camera, 20x4 sec exposures, 10:08pm AEST.

For the disc of Mars, I used a ZWO ASI224MC CMOS camera and overlaid the (re-sized) image over the grossly over-exposed Martian disc.

Cheers

Dennis
Attached Thumbnails
Click for full-size image (Mars Phobos Deimos 4 sec x 20 IP6 CombineFilesAvg AA6 Hist ST3 Overlay Crop 1024.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Mars Phobos Deimos 4 sec x 20 IP6 CombineFilesAvg AA6 Hist ST3 Overlay Crop 1024 Moon Text.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Mars Phobos Deimos 4 sec x 20 IP6 CombineFilesAvg AA6 Hist ST3 Overlay Crop 1024 Moon Star Text.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Mars Phobos Deimos 4 sec x 20 IP6 CombineFilesAvg AA6 Hist ST3 Overlay.jpg)
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