My best mars ever! 11th Oct

[TidaLpHasE]

Great pics of Mars Mike, don't know how you do it with the 10" dob

[asimov (John)]

Umm....good luck with the weather Rumps, it's raining here at the moment...

[rumples riot]

Dave lets not get too excited. If I image at 5x this gives me a FL of 12500 and an effective magnification of 2083x assuming that the Toucam is equal to 6mm. I have heard some people say that it is equal to a 4mm. But even 2083x is very extreme. When I tried imaging Jupiter at this mag it was the nearly half the size my lap top screen and would not fit entirely in the 640x480 imaging box. So Mars will most like be about two inches across and need really good seeing to make a great shot like the guys in the States.

BTW, I will be waiting!!! Got me a really big scary knife.

[davidpretorius]

nope, we will expect nothing less than 4"!!!!!!

pssst asi and ken, i think he is on to us!!!!

he has a big knife!!!!

[asimov (John)]

nah!! 'that ain't a knife'.....

[acropolite (Phil)]

Huffy wrote..

Mike the King Of Mars

Does that mean he used Marsking tape...... Amazing images mike, as h0ughy said, you are the king of Mars..

[gaa_ian (Ian)]

Well done Mike ..
Its great to see such good images of Mars
Do you have an Iceinspace viewing of Mars planned for the opposition ?
Mars viewings are huge ! ....lots of public interest !
Great chance to promote Iceinspace !

[iceman (Mike)]

do you shift the blue at all in astralimage when you recombine, or is that what you term bleeding?

Do we know why the blue bleeds and appears as bigger circle???

I don't shift the blue channel any extra - I just use the registax RGB align "estimate" function and it does a good job. I think it is called bleeding, when the IR filter is not used and some of the colours appear to be misaligned, but i'm not sure on the correct technical explanation for it.

You will become more fussy now with your seeing

You're right Gary, that's the problem when you have a night of good seeing - one good image later and you'll never accept anything less from then on!

As for your shot, nice colour rendition and image scale is very good. Interesting to compare my shot from two days ago and yours. Very similar in size given that I used the 2.5x and the rotation is also very similar

Thanks Paul, the image scale would've been pretty much identical, as your 2500mm FL + 2.5x powermate = 6250mm, the same as my 1250 with a 5x powermate. It's interesting to see the same face taken by different scopes in different parts of the country at the same time.

Do you have an Iceinspace viewing of Mars planned for the opposition ?
Mars viewings are huge ! ....lots of public interest

Thanks Ian, but no, i'll be at the starcamp in ballarat for the opposition. Praying for good seeing!

Thanks for all the comments everyone! I appreciate it.

Fantastic Mike!!

What a great capture, the best I've seen in awhile

You'll have to submit it to AS&T

regards,CS