Mars 14/10 unexpected good seeing at 10pm

[Nik271]

Hi!

Yesterday was quite windy and I thought I would only do a bit of visual, but suddenly around 10pm the seeing improved and I decided to try imaging. I attached my Canon 250d at the diagonal to increase the focal length a bit and took 4min video. Then Pipp, As3! and finally Registax for wavelets and dispersion correction. Came out better than I expected, in fact this is the clearest I've managed so far of this side of Mars. I think the faint bright spot on the top right is cloud over Olympus Mons. This is a first for me

 

(Scope: Skymax 180, camera: Canon 250d in 4k crop mode)

Thanks for looking!

Nikolay

[Barry-W-Fenner]

Great image Nikolay with some lovely subtle details showing. Mars has some great features to observe/image.

 

Baz

[Luminated]

Hey Nik, great capture! Especially for the current weather! When doing visual initially what magnification where you at? Is your image close to what you were seeing, albeit smaller scale I guess?

[Nik271]

4 hours ago, Luminated said:

Hey Nik, great capture! Especially for the current weather! When doing visual initially what magnification where you at? Is your image close to what you were seeing, albeit smaller scale I guess?

Thanks!

This image is pretty close to what I was seeing in the moments of best clarity. Visually I use between 150 and 300 magnification and then Mars is reasonably large: at x300 it looks like an orange at arms length. But normally I stay within 200-250x because of the seeing.

I was imaging at the native focal length, i.e. 2700mm. Magnification is irrelevant when imaging, the relevant notion is image scale. My Canon has pixel pitch of 3.7 microns  and I was imaging at .28 arcseconds per pixel. Mars is about 22 arcseconds so the image is about 80 pixels wide. On the sensor the projected image is ridiculously small : 3.7 x30/1000 mm so just 1/10 of a mm. My camera sensor in 4k crop mode is 3840x2160 and at 80 pixels Mars is tiny on the screen of the camera, just a little red dot. I use Pipp to crop the movie frames to 300x300 pixels and center the planet before stacking.

 

Nikolay