Several years ago now I bought a property at Clayton Bay in South Australia. Over the course of several years holidays I had noted how good the seeing was at that location. I had viewed Mars during the 2005 apparition there and the was very impressed with the steady skies. Added to this, the town is a dark sky township. It was a bonus either way. So I bought a house there and set up an observatory on the property. The dark skies have pretty much distracted me from using the site for my original intention (aside from a couple of planetary images that I have done over the Christmas breaks for the last couple of years) until now. This summer season our home in the Adelaide hills has been beset by gully winds which have destroyed seeing on every clear night. Two weeks ago I had decided after seeing so many great Mars images that it was time for me to put the C14 down at Clayton and try my luck.
I have had the site tested with the societie's DIMM and it has come up on average of 0.7 arc seconds. Only problem is that the site does sometimes suffer from cloud or fog formation with it being so close to the ocean, thus why I had not generally tried more planetary imaging. It is great for DSO imaging but frustrating for planetary work.
Seeing in the last week has been fairly typical (good solid seeing) but clouds on three occassions have prevented me from obtaining a nice image or even setting up. Last night was almost the same but I picked up some solid data just as Mars hit the meridian. I did not bother with Saturn, but the views of it through the eyepiece were magnificient to say the least. I will get that later this week. Saturn being higher in the sky than Mars presented detail in the bands around the planet and the Cassini division was a solid thin black line. Perhaps I should have imaged Saturn but knowing that the wind shear will improve this week means that I will get another opportunity.
Click here for site image and to see other Mars images. Click on the picture to take you out to the Mars gallery. I have included the image here for those who prefer to view the image here.
My best Mars to date, some minor flaws but overall I am pretty happy to have a run on the board for this apparition.