A subtle mars from March 27th.

[cathalferris]

I'm a little bit farther along the learning curve with the solar system imaging attempts with the 600D.

On the night of the 27th I took about 40 minutes of video in total of Mars in clips of various lengths. For one clip of about 3 minutes or so (~9000 frames) I used AS!2 to stack the best 100 frames with the 1.5x drizzle option. The image is fairly sharp but very low-contrast (at least it appears so), and doesn't respond to wavelets that well. It's fairly accurate to what I remember from the eyepiece though.

Capture details:

Eos 600D, movie mode, 3x zoom, ISO1600, exposures about 1/100 sec. 5800K temp, 1920x1080 30fps. Used Magic Lantern for exposure control.

8" OO newt, 2x TV barlow with extension tube from another barlow for about 2.7x.

Processing:

Converted and cropped from .mov to .avi with Super. Convert from .avi to .avi(old style) with Virtualdub. Stacked in AS!2, 1.5x drizzle.

Wavelets in R6 only made noise appear.

Ran into problems with all the stacking programs with the original converted files (~50-90Gb) so I had to crop and restack from the original .mov files. The image scale is about 0.3 arsec/pixel so I should be good for sampling rates as per Shannon's, but I appear not to have much in the way of fine detail or contrast in the image. I'm reasonably sure of my focus...

Anyone else have tips or if anyone wants to do a re-process of the stacked image, I can upload the .tif from the stack.

All criticism gratefully accepted

[Kokatha man]

Hi C - pretty hard working on a screenshot and only a 100-framer :eek:but you caught some reasonable details with some clouds as well as the NPC: Sinus Sabaeus/Meridiani, Oxia Palus, Niliacus Lacus & Mare Acidalium etc:icon_salut:.....try using about 1000 frames from AS!2 and I'm sure you'll do much better.

If you like send me (pm first) an unprocessed stack or the avi (must be loadable into AS!2) zipped if it's too large and I'll do a repro when I have the time and post the outcome plus all the steps with screenshots on how to get there.....and here's a very rough working of that screenshot.

[Clayton]

Here's my quick fiddle in CS3

[cathalferris]

I re-stacked Mars, and I'm quite a bit happier with this one now.

3000 frames from the 9500 available, and this time the wavelets did something useful.

New result:

It looks a lot more like a Mars I could be proud of, for an 8" newt with a DSLR. Much more detail, more snappy albedo features, and a cleaner image. As with everything, it's a learning curve..

The pointers are all appreciated

Cheers,

Cathal.