Surprise Mars Result in Poor Seeing - July 12th 2020

[ArmyAirForce]

Seeing was poor in the North East of England on the evening of 11/12th July, but despite that, I went out to catch some planets. Jupiter and Saturn are too low in the sky for my observatory to see, so I tried a Skywatcher 130M on a motored EQ2 in the front garden. Results were as expected for targets so low ( around 12 degrees ).

Mars however was going to be high enough for the observatory, so later in the night, I opened that up and started shooting in both colour and mono IR. Seeing got steadily worse through the evening and I wondered if I was going to get anything worth while, but an initial quick stack between captures showed promise. Mars was still only 17 degrees altitude by the time it was getting light and I took a walk to find Neowise.

The following day, I started stacking and processing and was pleasantly surprised at what came from the captures. See two brief clips of the capture videos below.

 

 

 

[RT65CB-SWL]

Very nice!
I was tempted to get one of my 'scopes out on the morning of Sat. 11 Jul. 2020, when I had my first view of C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE).

[Pete Presland]

Nice end results there, some decent detail visible there.

[Jarvo]

Beautifully presented. 

[Cosmic Geoff]

That's an impressive improvement from the original bouncy video. The results are markedly better in IR.