Mars and my first volcanoes! 19th Sep

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi guys.

Thanks to my backyard trees, I'm having to get up earlier and earlier to image Mars in the north before it gets obscured my the trees. It's now so early than I can go back to bed after i'm done!

I got up at 2:20am yesterday to catch Mars, and while the jetstream maps weren't favourable, I find that between 2am-4am the seeing can be quite steady, regardless of what the jetstream maps show.

It was pretty good yesterday, about 7/10, and I was finally able to image a face of Mars I haven't seen before - the side with Mare Sirenum and Olympus Mons!

I also captured one avi with the IR-blocking filter removed, but the colour balance just wouldn't correct itself and the image is very washed out, and there doesn't appear to be as many details.. so I'm fairly convinced that an IR blocking filter is useful on Mars.

Anyway below you can see the best from the morning, comments welcomed.

Each image was stacked (about 300 frames) and wavelets processed in registax, and then deconvolution processing in AstraImage. Final composite in Photoshop.

[gbeal]

Nice Mike, very nice.
The I/R off shot does indeed look washed out, maybe you have convinced me, maybe.
What we all need is some decent seeing, but these are still very very good.

[John K]

Awsome images Mike. Well done.

Any chance of getting some info on the deconvolution processing that you have talked about and how this compares to the processing available in the wavelets area of Registax and the processing that can be done in Photoshop?

[vindictive666 (John)]

nice pictures mike

wish i had a camera

[RB (Andrew)]

As always Mike you've pulled off another stunner of a Mars Compilation.
I'ts amazing to see what a difference the IR filter makes.
Which IR filter are you using?


Andrew

[atalas]

Yes I agree Mike these are very good shots , looking forward to your opposition shots !
Boy Mike you sure have grown in a very short time ! have a look back at your first shots .

Louie

[rumples riot]

Nice stuff Mike, glad to see someone is getting something of Mars. The weather here has been so bad and seeing not so good that it is impractical to get up at all. On top of that I am driving to Murray Bridge (70km) everyday to complete a stage of a project I have. So am too tired to get up or stay. However, maybe I will do it tomorrow morning.

However, your shots are very, very good and will mean that your Saturn shots this year will be vastly improved from last year, as will your shots of Jupiter next year. Your skills have grown immensely. Congratulations.


Paul

[davidpretorius]

Well done mate, I would love for you to have a go at my modded toucam with as much of your stuff as you can bring to star camp. Your processing is very very good to bring out the natural features so brilliantly.

I know you are not bringing your scope, but I would feel that it is a real waste of your talents if we can't get you doing this stuff at star camp. Consider my scope and toucam at your immediate disposal and i would like to think we can get a list of "must do" IIS projects whilst all that wonderful equipment is available to play with.

My laptop is coming with lots of memory, so any software you feel we would need, let me know what i may need to load etc

Great stuff

[beren]

Top stuff again Mike , like Paul said good to see someone out it seems to be perpetually unfavourable out west during the winter period

[Mick (Michael)]

Nice work Mike. It would be interesting to mask out Mars and try to capture Phobos and Deimos. Found this amazing Viking2 image of the Martian shield volcano (Ascraeus Mons) and Phobos. Mars and moons

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks very much for the comments, guys.

The I/R off shot does indeed look washed out, maybe you have convinced me, maybe

I agree Gary, I was very surprised to see the difference. I'm not sure why the colour balance wouldn't even itself out. I'll do some more testing in the days to come but so far it's convinced me.

Which IR filter are you using?

It's an edmund scientific one, it cost me $120 but others have the baader one and it only costs $80. afaik, they all do the same job.

Any chance of getting some info on the deconvolution processing that you have talked about and how this compares to the processing available in the wavelets area of Registax and the processing that can be done in Photoshop?

Hi John. I use "AstraImage" to do the deconvolution. The process I go through is:
1. Align/stack/lightly wavelet process in registax, save.
2. Open the image in AstraImage, split into the RGB components.
3. For each RGB image, I do LR deconvolution, with a iterations of 3 and value of 1.3. Those values can differ depending on the size and quality of your original image.
4. I then do a RGB combine to combine them back into one image.
5. I then do an unsharp mask filter.
6. The demo version doesn't have save ability, so I take a screenshot and paste it in photoshop where I do the final composite.

I'm not 100% on what the deconvolution process actually does, there's literature on the web about it if you wanted to do some reading. It's a form of wavelet processing, in a way. I know some people just save the stacked image from registax and do ALL their processing via deconvolution.
I have also read that some people do all their processing in photoshop, which would generally be a lot of unsharp mask and colour balance, I imagine.

Boy Mike you sure have grown in a very short time ! have a look back at your first shots

Thanks Louie, but Mars is also helping out - it's a lot bigger now than it was when I first imaged it

However, your shots are very, very good and will mean that your Saturn shots this year will be vastly improved from last year, as will your shots of Jupiter next year. Your skills have grown immensely. Congratulations

Thanks Paul - I was never happy with any of my Saturn images from last opposition so I'm looking forward to getting a decent image this time around. And yes Jupiter with a bigger image scale and not drifting through the FOV in 6 seconds, i'll be very pleased about

David, thanks for the offer and we'll see at the camp - hopefully there'll be time for all that playing around. The night is long!

Thanks again for all your nice comments.

[ving (David)]

nice job mike
mars is almost out at a reasonable time now

[RapidEye]

Wow - super sequence!!!
Congrats!!!

[Robby]

About deconvolution... It quite complicated, but it's a mehtod to determine the characteristics of the optical path. I attended a talk at the astrophoto camp about it, but can't really remomber much !!
The short story is, for practical applications, you need to have RAW images to get it to work properly. So Jpegs generally do not work very well. I have had very little success in deconvolution even with RAW images. Also the process of stacking would eliminate any info that deconvolution would require.
Did it work very well for you Mike?
Those Mars images of yours are getting very good. I must get out an image the planet one of these days! I did all the early morning stuff in 2003, so this time I'm happy to wait for the planet to be visiting at a more socialble hour!! Even if it will be lower!
Cheers