Mars double-up!

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi all.

Here's a couple of images of Mars, taken Friday night the 11th and Saturday night/Sunday morning 12th/13th of November, from near Sydney Australia, where Mars was only 35deg altitude.

On Friday the seeing was about 4.5/10, on Saturday night it started at 3/10 which is why I used the 3x barlow, but it improved to 5.5/10 as the night went on so I went back to the 5x powermate.

The images were stacked in registax, LR deconvolution in AstraImage, followed by sharpen/noise reduction in Neat Image, and final colour balance adjustment in Photoshop.

Combined with my image from the 9th, it's 3 sessions in a row now that i've been capturing the same face.. i'm kinda ready for a new look I'll have to start a bit earlier tonight if the seeing/clouds permit!

Equipment used:
10" dob on EQ platform and a ToUcam @ 10fps

Comments welcome.

[matt]

great shots mike

was wondering whether you saw that question i posted about the cybershot afocal photography of Mars?

[Robert_T]

Hi Mike, looks good - at least there's plenty to look at on this face of mars, though the Solis Lacus region's maybe has more.

[QUOTE=iceman] LR deconvolution in AstraImage [QUOTE]

What does LR deconvolution do?

cheers,

[beren]

Damn thats good ....hot work Mike heaps of detail present , man you have to be stoked with that

Great shot Mike!

Wish the skies here would be favourable I would love to image Mars : (

regards,CS

[fringe_dweller]

Nice one Mike thats my favourite side of mars too

[Hitchhiker]

Nice images Mike. That's my favourite part of Mars too!

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks guys, I think it's one of my best of the red planet!

Robert, i'm not 100% sure on the technical explanation, probably should wait for bird to chime in.

I use it because other (better) planetary imagers (such as Bird) use it. I bring my RGB image into AstraImage, use "Process->Split Colour Planes" which splits it into separate RGB images (useful on its own), then do a LR deconvolution on each plane, and then use "RGB combine" to bring them back together. It seems to make my image sharper without introducing too much extra grain.

[davidpretorius]

these are great mike!

[RB (Andrew)]

Fantastic Mike and love how you have presented them.

Well done mate, and thanks so much for sharing the info too.

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks Dave and RB!

Just when I'm getting the hang of Mars imaging, it's already getting considerably smaller.