Mars 10th Oct 2020 - best to date

[Tommohawk]

Hi all. A break in the rotten weather the other day and fortunately had the opportunity to get set up in plenty of time.  That said, I went in for a while to give Mars time to rise pretty much to the meridian and although the sky had been clear and the forecast good, there was a shower which fortunately wasnt too heavy. No harm done, the scope was only elevated about 20 deg at that point and the cap was on. Fortunately I'd also closed my kit box and closed the laptop.

The seeing looked pretty poor - I had a nightmare getting focussed - and it was petty blowy. I'm sheltered from the wind by a high bank which is a disaster for views to the East, but great as a wind break, so the scope didnt get too battered but the image looked plenty wobbly. As it happend though the result was pretty good - best yet I'd say.

Used my experimental scope - F4 250mm Quattro mirror mounted in 250mm Flextube scope with Omegon Velox 385C camera mounted at prime focus. I did white balance at capture this time because the RGB peaks are quite different and I wanted to be sure to avoid clipping. Getting quite used to the Toupsky capture software now. The best result was using 3x 6 minute back to back AVIs at 8ms giving 165FPS, giving about 178,000 frames. The gain was ridiculously low - I thought I'd done something wrong! AVIs joined in PIPP, best 25% then through AS!2, best 6%, then put the sharpened conv file through PS.

Very pleased with the result, after quite a bit of testing the Omegon 385C gets a big thumbs up from me. Happy to receive comments as ever, thanks for looking.

One question - does anyone know what AS!2 does to produce the conv file? I cant get anything as good using Registax wavelets.