[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

Finally, after travelling for work the last couple of weeks I'm back home and the weather has started to clear up... I've been hanging out to have a go at Mars so I stayed up late last night.

Conditions ended up as very poor, high haze and a bright nearby moon - only about a dozen stars were visible across the whole sky. Mars was at about 45 degrees altitude and the moon was even lower at about 30 degrees (only just clearing the trees!).

The seeing was reasonably stable but the haze robbed me of a lot of light so I had to use longer exposures.

Overall I'd rate the imaging conditions as 2 - 2.5 / 10. Not good, but I had a go anyway.

The result was not so bad, there's some cloud formations visible near the centre of the disc, the NPH can be seen, the SPC is visible.

The low quality of the raw frames meant I had to process it really hard, apologies to the purists :-)

Details:

10" f/6 newtonian
5x powermate + extender for effective 6x
PGR Dragonfly Express camera, 640x480 16bpp monochrome
Astronomik R,G,B filters
R=G=33ms B=66ms
Captured with Coriander for Linux, processed in Registax, Astra Image
and the GIMP for Windows.

regards, Bird

Edit: Mike Sirois enhanced my images a bit further in Neat Image, so I've replaced
my original image with a new one that includes his enhancements.