Mars 14/09/20

[Yawning Angel]

I had another crack at the red planet, this time without a barlow, but smaller pixels (Zwo asi178 instead of the 174). Celestron C8

It was a bit of a fight get anything approaching focus this time, with the best still seeming a little blurred.  I would usually have doubted a bit of kit (or user error, of course) but collimation was checked earlier and everything was dew free, so perhaps I should have sacrificed a chicken to the northern sky god?!

The RGB was mushy, and as expected, blue the worst, green was so-so and red passable. The saving grace was the ProPlanet IR bandpass (642), which sharpened up nicely to reinforce the details - it a close call between that or the Celestron Focus Motor for 'most useful purchase'

I'm not sure how much further the C8 can be pushed on this target?

[Barv]

Hi

That's a very tidy image. Conditions were pretty good generally last night with no jetstream around. You can go further in these conditions but you'll need to use that barlow I'm afraid. Some form of focus control is pretty essential with something like F20, but patience doing the focusing is key here.

Best

Harvey

[astroman001]

Smaller but nice colour balance and detail.

Peter

[Yawning Angel]

I set to learning what WinJoPos can do, and derotated the sub frames - (the post-processing differs slightly, thus the colour differences) but the details stand out a little more in the deroatated version

 v 

Derotated left, vanilla stack right

This is using the same files out of AS!3, with the same basic sharpening applied before combining into LRGB. LRGB was done in PixInsight for the vanilla version, and WinJoPos for the derotated one

Every day is a school day 🙂

Edited September 17, 2020 by Yawning Angel