Mars 10th Sep 2020 - Animation

[AbsolutelyN]

This is my first attempt at an animation of Mars. It was taken this morning between 00:12 and 1:55 UTC. It's a bit flickery, I think I need to move to Firecapture as that seems to have preset exposures per filter. 

Taken though a 250PDS (which needs better collimation) with a ZWO 1600MM Pro. 3x Barlow so 3600mm focal length. It was a lot easier to frame up with a larger sensor and then to reduce resolution on capture. 

You can see the light patch (dust storm or cloud?) visible last night move from centre of frame to left edge.  Mount Olympus is visible and looks to me to develop a shadow as it moved to the terminator. 

 

[JeremyS]

Excellent!

[MarkAR]

Brilliant, well done.

[dweller25]

Absolutely marvellous 👍

[Debo]

Very nice 

[Yawning Angel]

Love it!

[CraigT82]

Very nice! The light patch is the orographic cloid over Arsia Mons which has developed nicely over the past few days. I agree with the Olympus Mons shadow development too, lovely stuff! 

[callisto]

Good result 👍

 

Mark

[skyhog]

I'm really impressed with anims of the planets, that's very nice. I'm tempted to have a go with Mars entering a more civilised time. I'll have to check drive space, imagine these things produce huge files. Lots of small captures against long captures for the best individual frames? A topic worthy of debate for those who do this probably. 

Ed

[AbsolutelyN]

11 minutes ago, skyhog said:

I'm really impressed with anims of the planets, that's very nice. I'm tempted to have a go with Mars entering a more civilised time. I'll have to check drive space, imagine these things produce huge files. Lots of small captures against long captures for the best individual frames? A topic worthy of debate for those who do this probably. 

Ed

Thanks. It's well worth a go, I really enjoyed it. I'm used to fully automated deep sky but this was hard work as I didn't really know what I was doing and it was all new to me. I was using sharpcap and had to constantly switch filters and exposure (loads of IR, G, B 1 min exposures for 2 hours). I don't know if you can automate that in sharpcap or not but I've now found FireCapture can do this and run a repeating sequence so will definitely be using that next time, it looks brilliant for it.  In all it used 35GB of disk space to create. 

[AbsolutelyN]

20 hours ago, CraigT82 said:

Very nice! The light patch is the orographic cloid over Arsia Mons which has developed nicely over the past few days. I agree with the Olympus Mons shadow development too, lovely stuff! 

Thanks for the info, it's amazing to be able to see localised weather conditions on Mars from back garden. I wish I'd taken more now as may have made that shadow more obvious as it approached terminator, I could not see that until ran it as an animation next day. 

[skyhog]

Thanks for the info, it certainly paid off! 

Ed

[astroman001]

Even so, that is a nice animation. Can see how the seeing changes over time as well. 

Peter

[Jarvo]

brilliant work. Did you use a separate animation package?

[AbsolutelyN]

43 minutes ago, astroman001 said:

Even so, that is a nice animation. Can see how the seeing changes over time as well. 

Peter

Thanks. Yes seeing was dubious at best.

[AbsolutelyN]

1 hour ago, Jarvo said:

brilliant work. Did you use a separate animation package?

Thanks. No I manually aligned each mono image to RGB channels in photoshop and then layered them up and used the timeline in photoshop to animate. Took hours! Sure there is a better way. 

Edited September 11, 2020 by AbsolutelyN

[Barv]

Great work, well done!

[morimarty]

Thats a excellent animation well worth every minute spent producing it.

[si@nite]

Great Mars animation 👍!