God of war, God of the sea 09/09/20

[Yawning Angel]

The evening was supposed to be a shakedown ready for some Mars attempts in the coming weeks, however after sorting collimation and focus on the C8 and fiddling with FireCapture (I've been meaning to try it, instead of SharpCap) I got distracted by Neptune. I'd post the picture, but its basically a few blue-greenish pixels. 

The Neptunian distraction meant that Mars had cleared the nearby houses and was valiantly batting with the haze to put on a show, so why not!

Celestron C8 and 2.5x barlow
Altair Hypercam 174m @ 20% gain
Filters: Baader RGB and Astronomik ProPlanet 642

Each channel was 30 seconds at 15ms yielding around 2000 frames each. Stabilized in FireCapture, so straight to AS!3. Very mixed sky with some sneaky clouds, so 10% stacks
The 4 resultant frames where then dropped into PixInsight for 'Restoration Filter', 'FFTRegistration' and LRGB combine (IR for L)
Slight nudge of the colours to balance it up and voila!

Oh, go on then, here's the Neptune blob:

 

[MarkAR]

A great Mars and the best blob I've seen for a while.

[CraigT82]

Cracking! How did you capture the Neptune image? I tried for it last night but the one area of sky that was cloudy was right where Neptune was.

[Yawning Angel]

43 minutes ago, CraigT82 said:

Cracking! How did you capture the Neptune image?

Thank you!

Neptune was a fluke, but I took just 20 frames each LRG and B @500ms 5000 gain (as high as it goes!). Stacked 50% then laid them together manually in PS. RGB added as channels, with L on top and blended. Denoise and a colour balance to finish

[AstroNtinos]

Perfect images of Mars and NEptune and the title is excellent.