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Old 09-09-2020, 04:01 PM
Dennis
Dazzled by the Cosmos.

Dennis is offline
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Brisbane
Posts: 11,820
Fear and Dread stalk the night skies in Brisbane

From:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/m...y_type%3Ailike

"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.

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
Attached Thumbnails
Click for full-size image (Mars Phobos Image Crop 1024.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Mars Phobos Image Text Crop 1024.jpg)
146.4 KB35 views
Click for full-size image (Mars Phobos Image ST4 02_03AM Crop 1024.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (ST4 Moons Panel.JPG)
89.4 KB14 views

Last edited by Dennis; 09-09-2020 at 04:40 PM.
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