[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

I tried lots of different tricks today to see if I could increase the signal/noise in my raw frames before processing,and finally found something that seems to work a treat.

I ran all the frames through an "optimal estimation" filter which comes as part of the netpbm package - google for it if you are interested, and not afraid of the command-line... Don't panic - Windows commandline versions are available :-)

As a result the input frames to registax were smoother and I could get more mileage out of them. This should be my "final" image (is there such a thing?) from the Snake Valley camp.

This time there's three images, Paul (aka Rumples) mentioned that the earlier ones were a bit dark, and now I know why. This time there should be something for everyone :-)

Interesting sidenote: I measured the size of mars in an image viewer, and it came to 150 pixels - corresponds to an 8x effective barlow in my scope, so image brightness would have been around f/48.

EDIT: I've added another image as well, taken at 3am when the seeing was at its best even though mars was dropping lower in the sky.

regards, Bird