Mars 28/12/2016

A stacked image of Mars taken on 28/12/2016. 89.9% illumination.

Camera settings: Cannon 550D in 640x480 movie crop mode at 60fps. ISO 400, exposure 1/80. With a Baader fringe killer filter.

Telescope: SW Skymax 150, 1800mm FL F/D = 12.

Mount: SW EQ5 Pro.

Processing: Frames uncompressed and quality filtered using Pipp. I extracted the best 2000 frames from ~4mins of footage (14400 frames). I then aligned and stacked the best 40% of the remaining 2000 frames in Registax. The stacked images was sharpened using the wavelets function.

Comments:

Once Venus went behind the trees, Mars was my next target. Like Venus, this is my first attempt at imaging the planet. Because of its distance from Earth (1.62 AU) any detail of its surface is beyond the resolution of the scope but it was still good to resolve pits disk.