Mars 8/9/10th June + Saturn.

[johnh]

SPX350 F41.3, PGRFlea3, Baader RGB filters.

Managed 3 nights with Mars with near to good seeing on the 9th.  Managed to get Olympus Mons + volcanoes and Elysium areas.  Seeing was variable but did settle.  I put together a GIF of Mars on the 9th.   I also got a reasonable Saturn with equatorial dark patch moving red channel in the GIF .

Regards, John.

 

[StargeezerTim]

Fabulous images and gif's 

[Aussie Dave]

Very nice John, fantastic detail and colour on both planets. Envious!

[Tyson M]

Incredible images. Mars is truly special here. Loving the banding on Saturn

[Stu]

I have no idea how you manage that John, quite incredible images with amazing detail. Lovely!

[skybadger]

Those canals on Mars really stand out. What are those circular things -space ports?

 

[laudropb]

Terrific set of images. Wonderful detail captured. Very impressive.

[Alan]

Beautiful images John, very jealous

[Pete Presland]

Enough to make you want to emigrate  A spectacular set of images, particularly the Mars images.

[neil phillips]

Lovely work John, have you thought about trying a ZWO camera. I have sold my 618. getting a zwo 290

[johnh]

Thanks everyone, weather has turned ugly now for a week or so.

Neil there are so many new CCD's available some one shot colour too.  I just felt I would leave it for a while at these ccd are only about 10% more sensitive or so, the main improvement is low noise, the ASI120 is about the same sensitivity.  I like the ASI174 it has similar pixel size, there may be more sensors out in the coming years, so I have been thinking about it but the F3 is so good especially in IR - perhaps it is just laziness.  For Mars 2018 (24.3") I may decide to change over?

John.

[Space Cowboy]

Great images John!

[Freddie]

A great set of images there.

[MarsG76]

Great images, John.

 

[neil phillips]

Can see your reasoning John, not sure what your frame rates are on the flea 3 are. But on the DMK  60 fps was a little limiting, With bigger scopes on bright targets more could be had for sure. 14" scope users seem to be getting considerably higher frame rates on Jupiter and mars than my DMK was. Wish I had one of these new cameras earlier.  Being into lunar I also wanted a bigger chip with fast frame rates, a advantage for sure. Not sure of your sensor size, or if you still do lunar though 

[johnh]

Yes Neil the ASI174 (1920x1200-5.86micron) is a bigger chip than the 618/Flea3 and the expensive Grasshopper 3 (the best planetary CCD) is 3.2 million pix (IMX252-2048x1536-3.45micron).  Bigger chip is great for whole Moon mosaics.

With Flea3 I use 16milli sec-62.5 fps for Mars you can go higher with F3 to 120fps, many with new CCD's are doing 75fps+ with little noise at 0.1 "/pixel.

John.

[neil phillips]

1 hour ago, johnh said:

Yes Neil the ASI174 (1920x1200-5.86micron) is a bigger chip than the 618/Flea3 and the expensive Grasshopper 3 (the best planetary CCD) is 3.2 million pix (IMX252-2048x1536-3.45micron).  Bigger chip is great for whole Moon mosaics.

With Flea3 I use 16milli sec-62.5 fps for Mars you can go higher with F3 to 120fps, many with new CCD's are doing 75fps+ with little noise at 0.1 "/pixel.

John.

Ahhh that makes sense, I suspected you was getting higher frame rates with the Flea. The advantage isn't as great as would be the case upgrading from the DMK then. QHY111 cams starting to come out now. Frame rates look very fast. Faster than ZWO on the 290 if I remember correctly. And that isn't exactly slow

I wonder if shooting in 10 bit rather than 12 bit mode, is workable on lunar with the very low noise 290 chip. Frame rates at full res in 10 bit mode can reach 170 fps

But not sure if the extra frames and extra noise balances out ? Be interesting to find out

[johnh]

With FIrecapture Neil there is an algorithm designed by Emil Kraaikamp which shows if higher bit rate is better above 8.  Usually only Venus or possibly the Moon is able to use higher bit rates (where the sky has no noise) but planetary/lunar mid tones don't usually benefit only faint Solar prominences against black sky is worth higher bit setting.

John.

[Linda]

I would like to ask a few newby question about taking Mars pictures. @johnh's pictures are amazingly sharp. I often see posts from other people showing pictures of Mars that are quite fuzzy and others respond that those are a very good picture. Is it just the difference in scope? @johnh, are you really using a scope with focus length 41,3? Is that some superscope? Is Mars a planet of which you can't expect to take very sharp picture of Mars with a normal scope?

I was wondering because I have seen so many quite sharp pictures of Jupiter. Mars doesn't seem to generate the same quality pictures. Or is it simple due to the low altitude of Mars and Jupiter standing high? I see now that Johnh lives in Australia and Mars should be a lot higher on the sky there.