[Doodles23 (Dave Bleser)]

We keep trying to offer the other side of Mars to complement your excellent shots such as this one. Life is hard as you know at 14 arc seconds. We are still newbies with our new Dragonfly2 camera and have an opinion about the camera that I'd like you to comment on. Specifically about life in the 12bit world. When you have a very bright planet like Mars then it is relatively easy to photograph Mars at 60 fps which will preserve nearly all the 256 levels of grey in the final image which makes stretching unnecessary. . When we switch to 30 fps at 12 bit, we don't notice a big difference in the final RGB image which is not surprising considering the monitor can only show 256 levels of grey. Such is not the case with Saturn which is dim and the dark frames do not stretch as smoothly as the 12 bit frames. Do you agree with this assessment?

And finally, we have been uploading our pictures to Japan's ALPO. But we rarely see any of the excellent photos from the Australians on that site? Is there a reason for this? I told my wife Gail that there are probably less than 50 astronomers around the world capturing images of Mars on any particular night. And ALPO only seems to get a few of them.

DB