First attempts at Mars

[AstroTom (Tom)]

Hi Everyone,

I'm a newbie on the forum and thought I would share my first attempts at capturing Mars. I took the photo below using a Celestron CPC 800 telescope and the Celestron Skyris 618C camera. I took over 10,000 frames with the camera and then processed in Registax 6.

Overall I am quite happy with the results and I have captured some detail on the planet as well as the Northern polar ice cap. Before taking this image I was using a 2 x barlow and was getting disappointing results. Unfortunately a 3 x barlow that I had ordered had not arrived and out of curiosity I used a 5 x Televue powermate that I had. I was not expecting a very good image but given that the conditions were quite good the final image is not bad. Hopefully on the next attempt I will have the 3 x barlow.

Regards,

Tom

[Astro_Bot]

That's not bad - better than my first attempt for sure.

[julianh72 (Julian)]

Just a thought - is 10,000 frames too many for Mars? (Unless shot over several nights, timing the video segments for Mars to present the same phase each time.)

Assuming 10 fps (say), 10,000 frames would amount to about 20 minutes of elapsed time as continuous video (or longer, if shot as several shorter videos), and the rotation of Mars could be significant over that much elapsed time, leading to motion blurring of the features that can be resolved? (Mars rotates through about 15 degrees per hour, as its rotation period is very similar to that of Earth.)

Would a maximum of say 5 minutes of continuous video yield better results? Or am I missing something here?

[Astro_Bot]

Yes, you're missing something.

His camera is capable of up to 120fps - Tom can obviously say more!

The Celestron Skyris 618C looks to be similar to the DBK21AU618.AS - same sensor, made by the same company (for Celestron) but probably with different firmware and tweaking of modes, since the DBK is limited to 60fps.

[AstroTom (Tom)]

Yes the 10,000 frames was taken at 120 fps. It equates to around 1.5 mins to capture this amount. I only recently acquired the skyris camera so was eager to try it out on Mars with the very high fps.

I actually ran some shorter captures with 5000 to 6000 frames but the results were very similar. The one thing I should have done was to shrink the photo a little before I uploaded it. It helps reduce the pixelation a little. My Jupiter photos seem to come out a little grainy too but I think it's because the seeing conditions was not that good when I've been capturing it.

I think the 5 x powermate may have just been a little too much for my telescope but hopefully when I can get my new Barlow I'll hopefully get some smoother images. Overall though I'm quite happy with the photo and my friends are quite impressed by it. I also took this in the suburbs of Brisbane where I still had some street lights to contend with too.

[MGTechDVP (Mariusz)]

That Mars looks great for a first time... my first Mars looked like a orange fuzzy blob with a slight hint of "A" dark marking, and I remember being very pleased with it... but this one runs rings around it, well done.