geoflewis

Excellent animation

Sorry Stuart, I missed this when you first posted it, it’s an excellent animation.

Thanks Stuart, somehow it makes the still images come to life......

There you go, why didn't I think of that? One for another time maybe

Thanks Kostas, PIPP made it easy using the TIFFs I'd already created. Ideally I'd have liked a bigger GIF image, but other than resizing all the source images all one by one, I don't know how to do that. I couldn't see anything in PIPP to enlarge the images during processing, but I think it's still worked pretty well.

Here's a GIF animation created in PIPP, using best 20k TIFFs from all the SERs that I captured, regardless of quality.... The elapsed time is approximately 4 hours. It's a bit jerky, partly due to gaps in capture, but also because I had to reset the ADC a few times, then rotate the camera back to the same orientation, as best as I could guess.

Thanks, though I'm not sure that the quality is sufficient to enlarge to poster size, though I do have some smaller 12"x8" photo prints of Jupiter and Saturn from a few years ago, so it's a good suggestion.....🤔

Thanks Stuart, it's taken 3 months to get good detail of this view of Mars....phew...!!

Nice additional image

Thanks Kostas, yes, I agree that the 2252 is the best and indeed one of the 3 SERs included in that de-rotated stack yielded the best from the entire session, but I felt the others were good enough to combine them. I possibly could produce an animation, but there would be some gaps especialy between those after midnight, where I had a run of 4x6m SERs that turned out pretty poor. My eyes are burnt out from processing that lot today 🥴, so I may take another look tomorrow, or later this week.

As per my 'taster' post earlier today, I spent approximately 4 hours last night imaging Mars while Syrtis Major was rotating from the limb, to just past the Central Meridian. I have now finalised processing the images and have created 2 separate montages, one for the 3 final images from before midnight (hence dated 2 Jan) and 2 after midnight (hence 3 Jan). The final images are all de-rotated stacks of best 20k frames per video. The 1st four images each comprise best 20k frames from each of 3 SERs, hence 60k frames in total and the last one is from 2 SERs, so 40k frames integrated. The longer time gap between some of the images is where the quality from the SERs that I captured between those times wasn't good enough to fully process and also why the last image from the session has less data included. The images are annotated with relevant details of capture and equipment used. Thanks for looking.

Thanks Kostas, even though the seeing was good at times, it was still quite variable over the 4 hours, so some SERs were easier to process and gave good detail, wheras others much poorer. Even so, I should have enough good images to fill in most of the gaps in my hoped for map.

Thanks Stuart, I've done the initial processing of all the vids through AS3! and Registax, some better than others, as to be expected. I've also completed a de-rotation stack in WinJupos of the TIFFs of best 20k frames from 3 consecutive videos (so 60k frames in total), further wavelets in Registax and final tweaks in Affinity Photo. Here's that final image displayed both south (looking like Africa) and north up, alongside the previous best (also north up) that I'd captured for this aspect of Mars this apparition, which was in those crazy winds on 29 Dec... It certainly is a good start to 2023....😀

As some of you will know, I've struggled to get good quality images of Mars showing Syrtis Major this aparition, that I want to allow me to create a reasonably hi res map of Mars. Finally last night, I had that rare combination of a clear sky, with good seeing and light winds, so I sat outside with the rig for the best part of 4 hours capturing 22 SERs as Syrtis Major rotated across the Martian disc. I actually stopped for about hour between 11pm to midnight, as I need to go inside to thaw out. Anyway, here are some taster images showind the first and last images from the session and one from about 1/3rd way through the night. These are not fully processed images and the seeing and resulting surface detail fell away as Mars lost elevation. I'll de-rotate and combine some of them, to see if I can squeeze a bit more detail, before final tweaks in Affinity Photo. I'll probably post the final results on a separate thread, which given the amout of data to process might not be for a couple of days yet, but I am so happy to get some decent data showing Syrtis Major, that I want to share this taster.....

Thanks @tomato, but I suspect that many of the 'likes' on your post are for your reference to the image's likeness to the iconic Apollo 8 'Earthrise' photo - a comparison that hadn't even occured to me.... Here's an earlier one that's even more similar I think...

Thanks Kostas, I have lots of good images for some aspects of Mars, but very few that include Syrtis Major and those that I do have are not particularly good. I’ll give it a bit longer to see if I can get any more images of the region, then will go with what I have.

Thanks Kostas, it’s the first time I’ve seen these edge artefacts, but then I would not normally try to image in such windy conditions and my AP1200 mount is so rock solid steady, that I can even bang it with my hand without losing the target. I was close to throwing them all away when AS3! wouldn’t play, then remembered PIPP so gave that a try, which worked after a couple of attempts. Happy New Year to you too.

Wow....!! Just wow....!!

The lunar occultation of Mars is the one for me. I'd been waiting 2 years for this one, then a few days before the event I caught my 2nd bout of Covid of 2022. Out in the freezing cold before 5am in the morning, feeling crap with clouds ruining the view, I wondered why I bothered, but then there was gap for about 5 minutes which allowed me to grab this, despite very little time to focus, hence the somewhat fuzzy result...

I've never had an issue with too tight an ROI previously, but then I'm not usually crazy enough to try and image in winds that strong. It was just that I wanted a better image of Syrtis Major whilst Mars was fairly full phase for me to try a high res full surface map, but I think the opportunity has probably passed now, unless I get a clear sky in the next few days.

I thought about checking manually, but 120k frames per SER.....😱. Yes, I use 'normalise stack' at 70% in AS3! - is that a good or bad thing for this issue? 🤔

Thanks. I'm new to PIPP this year (2022/23) as always thought it wouldn't add anything to my workflow, so I'm still finding my way around with it. However, how wrong was I about PIPP, I've used to both join and split videos, reduce/increase ROI, select small processing regions from full frame SERs (e.g. just Mars from it's recent lunar occultation), perform quality selection from a single SERs (as in this case) and multiple joined SERs, so there is lots that it can do and I bet I'll find more features as I continue to experiment. My biggest issue with it is the size of the files it generates, but otherwise I'd say give it a try.... WinJupos is great for de-rotating entire videos, or just TIFFs from already processed videos (which is how I usually use it) for fast rotating planets like Jupiter and really becomes almost essential if imaging in mono with RGB filters over an extended period, e.g. several minutes, but I find that it also allows me to squeeze a bit more out with targets like Mars, even with the colour camera that I've started to use this year. It can be a bit of a tedious process, but it is worth trying and not too bad once you get the hang of it.

Thanks Stuart, it was crazy really, but I was mostly disappointed that AS3! just saw the sharp edges when Mars drifted through the edge of the ROI as best frames / good seeing. Even PIPP still included some of them, but got rid of the worst, so the combination of PIPP and AS3! eventually got it done.

Thanks Neil, indeed the seeing wasn’t too bad, but the wind was something else. Glad you got to see some of the detail that I was able to capture with the camera.

Despite a raging Jetstream overhead and something similar at ground level (well 30+ mph winds), I headed out hoping to get an image Mars with Syrtis Major in view to improve the ones that I captured back in November. The seeing wasn't as bad as I anticipated, but the wind was horrendous with the C14 + dew shield bouncing around on the normally rock solid AP1200 mount. It was a devil of the job keeping Mars on the sensor, within the ROI, so I increased the ROI a couple of times to see if that helped, but I still kept losing Mars off screen. I tried a 1 min run, but reverted to my normal 6 mins and captured a few SERs at different ROIs. When I came to process them, AS3! seemed to like the sharp edges where Mars slipped out of the ROI, with the resulting stacks looking like this.... and this I tried several different alignment points and stack numbers, but AS3! wouldn't have it, so I decided to try to quality crop in PIPP. At first that didn't work well, but I eventually found a way to select best 30k frames from each SER and whilst at it crop the ROI of each video to the same 300px x 300px size. I then ran these through AS3! for best 10k frames, wavelets in Registax6, then de-rotated the best 2 consecutive SER/TIFFs in WinJupos. Further wavelets in Registax, then into Affinity Photo for final levels, saturation/vibrance adjustments and resized from 96dpi to 144dpi resulting in this... Mars is now only 15" diameter and 98% phase. The polar hood largely seems to have disappeared. I'm not sure if it is any better than, (or even as good as) my attempt for this aspect of Mars from 25 November, but I'm pleased to have salvaged something from the very challenging conditions. FYI here is the 25 Nov image, which was captured without a barlow lens, hence the smaller size image.