Hi all
Thought I share these snaps of Mars taken in sub-zero conditions last week. Seeing was fair with high level cloud around but improved steadily as the planet neared meridian. This is my first light with the newly acquired ASI 224MC and FireCapture software.
Imaged for an hour before persisting cold motivated me to pack up. As John H mentioned in his recent post the albedo features are quite pale now and I was disappointed with WinJUPOS derotation which produced a fairly soft and washed out image.. thus not including it here. Still playing with colour and hue balance in order to bring out blue wispy cloud features with this camera. So far I'm finding it much more trickier than with the old DFK CCD.
Stacked in AS!2 followed by Registax wavelets and ACDSee/Photoshop touch ups. Captured at F36 with TV 3x Barlow and WO 1.6x binoviewer nosepiece. The scope performed well collimation wise after being mothballed for nearly a year. Happy to be imaging again after missing Mars at its peak in May.
Astrobin links
Best image animation:
http://astrob.in/full/254729/0/
Whole hour animation:
http://astrob.in/full/254728/0/
Full res pic:
http://astrob.in/full/254730/0/
Thanks for looking,
Seb
