Mars 4th Jan 2014

[Sebbie (Sebastian)]

Hello again

Here's another Mars capture at dawn on Sunday morning after what I hope is an improved processing workflow. It was fun to push the scope once again to resolve surface features on the tiny 7'' disk.. 1.5 drizzle stack of 1200 best frames in AS!2, final image scaled up to 130%. Deconvolution plus noise reduction in Astra Image, white balance plus colour saturation adjustments in Photoshop CS6.

Three Tharsis volcanos (Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons and Ascraeus Mons) are clearly identifiable with Olympus Mons dead in the centre. There is also a hint of cloud cover over Alba Patera to the north - including couple of Starry Night Pro maps for reference.

Was going to post more Jupiter snapshots but the Mars bug has definitely taken over!

Thanks for looking

Seb

[INeedMySpace (Neville)]

Wow!

[malau (David)]

Nice one.

Did you use "web" cam (like those CCD..etc) to take and if you use any barlow lens?

[Sebbie (Sebastian)]

Originally Posted by INeedMySpace

Wow!

Thanks Neville.. that was my reaction also when the detail popped out following resizing of the resampled image (drizzle stack).

Originally Posted by malau

Did you use "web" cam (like those CCD..etc) to take and if you use any barlow lens?

David, I use DFK 21AU618 CCD which is a 60fps colour camera with a built in IR cut filter.. I simply would not be patient enough to shoot with a filter wheel - post processing is time consuming enough with the composite RGB image imo.

I wish that there was some way of batching AS!2 frame analysis step for multiple avis to speed up the cycle. Seeing conditions have a tendency to vary so quickly lately I'm finding that I cannot reuse the same optimisations for video clips taken several minutes apart. This Mars image was taken at f40 via a combination of two barlow lenses (Meade 2x and Televue 2x).

Cheers,
Seb

[Nortilus (Josh)]

that is amazing...well done on that image