Its images like this one that make me glad I got up at 4:30 am. I almost didn't process this avi, thinking another one was better, but decided to process it anway, and I'm glad I did. In previous apparitions, capturing the Hugyens crater was always a goal of mine with my 8 inch scope. Even in great seeing and Mars at 16 arcsecs, it was a challenge. But now I've been able to capture Huygens with Mars under 8 arcsecs.
I must admit that at first glance I could see no evidence of a crater but after consulting my Mars wall chart it was quite easy to identify at approx Long 303 degrees W and approx Lat 13 degrees S. My wall chart which is at quite a large scale labels this crater as Crater2 but I have misplaced the key for the chart.
Congratulations on imaging this crater with an 8" aperture, a most excellent achievement indeed.
Regards
Trevor
PS; Just found the key to my chart, yep, the Huygens Crater. Again, what a top effort this is.
Last edited by Quark; 03-11-2009 at 01:19 PM.
Reason: additional info
That’s a wonderful image of Mars, it looks very natural indeed – well done! I like the presentation too; aside from its scientific value it tells a story about the final image.
Cheers
Dennis
PS: Trevor, I read a CPC1100, would that be an 11” Celestron?
As Dennis has pointed out, your image was captured with an 11" aperture, you mentioned 8" in your post, obviously a previously much loved predecessor to your 11".
I must admit that at first glance I could see no evidence of a crater but after consulting my Mars wall chart it was quite easy to identify at approx Long 303 degrees W and approx Lat 13 degrees S. My wall chart which is at quite a large scale labels this crater as Crater2 but I have misplaced the key for the chart.
Congratulations on imaging this crater with an 8" aperture, a most excellent achievement indeed.
Regards
Trevor
PS; Just found the key to my chart, yep, the Huygens Crater. Again, what a top effort this is.
Trevor, thank you for this post. I posted that image to the Marsobservers list, and right away some people said "no way, impossible, not Huygens". I like you, too the time to do measurements and came up with what you did. If you don't mind, I will post what you said to that list, but will leave your name out. Thanks to the others for the kind comments.
I am use to eeking out electrical storms on Saturn, I have been supplying such data to a member of the Cassini RPWS team since Jan 2008.
I am accustomed to viewing the image from various angles and distances to try and identify structure. Ounce I found this feature in your image it became quite obvious.
Some points to consider with this matter.
The resolving power of an 11" scope, using Dawes Limit would be 4.56 / the aperture in inches. The result is expressed in arc sec's.
Therefore the theoretical resolution of your scope will be .4 of an arc sec.
The disk of Mars, on the night of your image was near enough to 8 arc sec's. The scale of your image on my screen is about 30mm pole to pole. Therefore 1 arc sec would represent 3.75mm across your image.
I am unsure of the angular size of Huygens for this night, however, what I find most compelling is that on my wall chart, the physical diameter of Huygens is very close to half the width of the Northern protrusion of Syritis Major.
Considering all of the above and relating the size of the feature that I detect in your image, it is not unreasonable to identify this feature as the Huygens Crater.
Trevor, you are a wealth of information and I appreciate it tremendously. Tony, here is a comparison to help you see what I am referring to in the pic. Keep in mind, I downsized Richard Bosman's image quite a bit. Mars was a lot closer when he took this image, which is outstanding btw.
