30 minutes on Mars 01/10/20

[Yawning Angel]

Some nights bear fruit, and sometimes not what you'd planned - in this case, I'd intended to run a few hours on Mars to make an animation of it's spin

Technology said no! Various things decided to misbehave - collimation was being a pain and Stellarium refusing to Sync the scope being the main time-sinks. Time for radical action: Take off the imaging train, slap in a diagonal and take a look with the old Mk1's. It's easy to forget, as primarily an imager, how stunning the views can be! Mars was showing plenty of detail to my eyes and shone like a marble on black velvet!

Brain and PC rebooted, back on with the camera etc for take 2. Luckily, apart from a smattering of wispy high cloud, the night was still glorious and the issues where put to bed

In the end I was able to gather 30 stacks of 500 frames, 1 per minute for 30 minutes (and a detour to the moon, because it was so shiny!). Not quite enough for the animation I had planned, but plenty for my new favourite software WinJUPOS!

Celestron C8, asi178mm, Astronomik ProPlanet 642 IR BP filter, ROI capture @640 x 480:

• Raw SER files stacking in AS!3
• Resulting tifs sharpened in Pi with the Restoration Filter
• Aligned in imPPG
• De-rotated in WinJUPOS
• (animation compiled from the tifs with PIPP)

1:1 400 x 400 crop

2:1 resample

Sharpened tifs, animated. 30 minutes doesn't show much rotation, but it's there!

The detour netted me this too, which makes me happy - the moon has been so low in the sky I've not been able to get the scope on it for ages!

Frustrations aside, a clear night is good for the soul! 

[Pete Presland]

Very nicely captured.