Hi. seeing was really bad the evening before, but had smoothed out quite well by 3am and improved as the morning progressed - transparency was pretty ordinary, but fairly consistent.
Mars was fairly well resolved, showing clouds all over the place (and possibly a dust storm?) and the dreaded bright edge ringing was not a major problem.
Saturn was quite detailed and I could even occasionally see much of Cassini in the blue band feed!! Have also included a heavily enhanced and scaled version of Saturn to show that, in addition to the bluish ribbon, there looks to be some storm residue structure in the darker zone nearer the equator.
Thanks for looking. Regards Ray
Impressed with the image scale you get on Mars. Is that scaled up?
I really like the heavily enhanced Saturn, but then again being colour blind I can't tell whether the colour balance is unnatural looking, I just like the increased contrast and detail.
Fantastic images Ray of both Saturn and Mars. Am I mistaken or can you even see a slight hint of the Encke gap in both saturn images. Well done - nice color also.
Hi Ivan. thanks. I used f31.7 for this Mars image (up from a normal f28.7). the resulting image was scaled 1.2x to optimise the presentation of features (to my eyes). re colour, I also have some colour impairment (cannot readily see casts) and have now resorted to using the auto balance (white) function in IRIS to drive the B ring on Saturn to a neutral grey and the icecap on Mars to white (assuming no saturation). For an object with no true neutral zones, such as jupiter, I have recently used Nebulosity to autobalance - more consistent than I am.
thanks Dave - very kind comment
thanks Steve - yeah, reckon I can just claim Encke in this image (finally...) - thanks for pointing it out
I love Mars when it is at this point approaching opposition and still in phase, always looks like a distant world plus the detail here with all those clouds makes it look like a distant inhabited world too.
