Mars 3rd April from Brisbane

[von Tom (Tom)]

I thought I'd give this a shot and, after about 20min of searching found Mars and managed to get some images of it.

The image below is when Mars was at altitude 14 degrees, (the Sun was already up behind some houses.

Shot with a Canon EOS 550D with 2x teleconverters in video crop mode at prime focus of a 12" Sky Watcher Goto Dobsonian. 400 out of 7000 frames stacked in Registax with RGB aligned.

Cheers,

Tom

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

That's what I call extreme imaging.

[Lester]

Good on ya Tom, someone had to be first to get Mars as we head towards another oppostion.

[von Tom (Tom)]

I first tried binoculars to fins Mars but I didn't see anything. I then tried the smaller finderscope and again nothing. Only after mounting the camera and sweeping did I find the planet.

For information:
Mars apparent diameter: 4 arcsecs
Elongation: 12.3 degrees West
Magnitude: 1.2

[Troy]

Yeap that's early.
Good to see Mars is on it's way back