Mars from London 15/04

[zicklurky]

Decided to dip my toes into planetary imaging, so I got a second hand C11 last week, and loving it! After getting the right connectors and collimating in the dark (never collimated before, that was fun, haha), I got something I'm pretty happy with. Now if only I could get Saturn half as sharp!

[catman161]

Wow!! For a first image with a new setup that is stunning! What camera did you use? What was the stack size? What processing did you do?

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[JamesF]

Agreed.  That's a cracker of an image.

James

[simmo39]

That is stunning! I live in hope of getting something like that.

[sologuitarist61]

That has come out very well!

[zicklurky]

Thanks everyone!

Oh I forgot the details in my rush out the door!

C11 with a 2.5x powermate, QHY5L-II mono and Baader RGB filters. I used red for the luminance.

R: 5ms, 396 gain, stacked 2000 out of 4700

G: 7.6ms, 516 gain, stacked 1000 out of 4700

B: 10ms, 811 gain, stacked 1400 out of 4700

Captured in FireCapture, stacked in AS!2, processed in Registax 6 and PS.

I think I way overdid the blue and green as I had to scale these back quite a bit in the RGB stack, so if the weather holds tonight I'll try shorter subs for those. Any thoughts? What exposure lengths do you pros use?

[Grotemobile]

Did the scope need much

collimating.I would have

not know were to start

with that.Great picture.

I can see that your getting

beter results out of it than

me.

Steve

[Rumbold2010]

What an amazing image, good work!!

[Pete Presland]

excellent image, very nicely done. the seeing really is the key to any decent image and Saturn with its low position is going to be pretty tough!

[zicklurky]

Thanks! Yeah I'm finding Saturn very difficult indeed, I'd love to get something that wasn't a big smudge.

Hi Steve. Loving the scope, I see what you mean - it's quite heavy! The collimation was a little off, just needed a bit of a fiddle.

Took some more shots last night experimenting with different settings, looking forward to playing with them over the weekend.

[C7tsj]

Cracking image, what a start!

[Toymaster]

Amazing detail there for any set-up never mind a new one.

A good reference for the C11.

As a relative newbie - what was the detail like visually?  At the moment I'm just getting a fuzzy disk with my 300P DOB and stock eyepieces.

Adrian

[andrew65]

Amazing detail:) quality pic

[andyman]

Yup....simply superb

[Wolfgangwand]

I've never seen an image by an amateur with quite as much detail and sharpness of our red neighbour as this. Superb job indeed.

[Siriusmeg]

That is the most beautiful image of Mars I've seen this year  

[zicklurky]

With the red filter it was quite good visually, it was reasonably crisp. Green was so-so, and blue was a mess! I tried a luminance filter and it was only ok - the red filter definitely helps with getting details.