My First Mars

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Had my first try at Mars tonight, using a 12" newt, 4x barlow and my Canon 1100D. Focus by luck & reckon. I used APT to record at about 13 fps, ISO 1600 and exposures of (I think) 1/160th second. I took 1000 frames and stacked the best 30%. Here's my first go at processing it, I'm not sure I got the RGB align quite right:

And another try using linked wavelets:

I'm very pleased with it - I was expecting a featureless mess - but I'd welcome any suggestions for improvement. Is there anything I can do about the fringe on the left for example?

I'll have another go at the processing tomorrow from scratch, and also put it the right way up. My camera was hanging off the scope at a crazy angle and the focuser could only just hold position.

[SunBear]

Cool! What did you have on there for an eyepiece?

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Cool! What did you have on there for an eyepiece?

Thanks. I didn't use eyepiece projection, the camera was fitted with a T-piece which went into the 4x barlow. With all that weight the focuser was complaining - tracking Mars the camera was hanging upside-down and kept slipping when I tried to rack it in. I had to support it from underneath while doing so.

[PeterCPC]

Pretty good image. Better than my efforts.

Peter

[paulastro]

Coo, that's great for a first attempt to say the least!  Thanks for sharing it.

[oldpink]

try doing a RGB align in registax that often helps with mars

other than that well done

[Virgoman]

....and an excellent first attempt it is! Mars is a tricky blighter to focus on - even more so in cruddy seeing. The fringe may be due to the seeing at the time. In my attempts I have had it present and absent. It was absent when the seeing was reasonable but made its presence known in our more usual (crappy) conditions  .  A fine effort!

                                    Best regards,

                                                            Ralph

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Thanks for the comments everyone.

....and an excellent first attempt it is! Mars is a tricky blighter to focus on - even more so in cruddy seeing. The fringe may be due to the seeing at the time. In my attempts I have had it present and absent. It was absent when the seeing was reasonable but made its presence known in our more usual (crappy) conditions  .  A fine effort!

                                    Best regards,

                                                            Ralph

Very useful to have a second opinion on that thanks. Looking at the individual frames I have two Mars in most of them and was suspecting the seeing conditions were the cause (Metcheck astro forecast gave the seeing a red zero that night), but I wasn't sure. Possibly the solution is to stack a smaller percentage of the frames, or to mask it out in post-processing.

[Clayton]

Congratulations