Trying for Syrtis Major - 29 Dec 2022

[geoflewis]

Despite a raging Jetstream overhead and something similar at ground level (well 30+ mph winds), I headed out hoping to get an image Mars with Syrtis Major in view to improve the ones that I captured back in November. The seeing wasn't as bad as I anticipated, but the wind was horrendous with the C14 + dew shield bouncing around on the normally rock solid AP1200 mount. It was a devil of the job keeping Mars on the sensor, within the ROI, so I increased the ROI a couple of times to see if that helped, but I still kept losing Mars off screen. I tried a 1 min run, but reverted to my normal 6 mins and captured a few SERs at different ROIs.

When I came to process them, AS3! seemed to like the sharp edges where Mars slipped out of the ROI, with the resulting stacks looking like this....

and this

I tried several different alignment points and stack numbers, but AS3! wouldn't have it, so I decided to try to quality crop in PIPP. At first that didn't work well, but I eventually found a way to select best 30k frames from each SER and whilst at it crop the ROI of each video to the same 300px x 300px size. I then ran these through AS3! for best 10k frames, wavelets in Registax6, then de-rotated the best 2 consecutive SER/TIFFs in WinJupos. Further wavelets in Registax, then into Affinity Photo for final levels, saturation/vibrance adjustments and resized from 96dpi to 144dpi resulting in this...

Mars is now only 15" diameter and 98% phase. The polar hood largely seems to have disappeared.

I'm not sure if it is any better than, (or even as good as) my attempt for this aspect of Mars from 25 November, but I'm pleased to have salvaged something from the very challenging conditions.

FYI here is the 25 Nov image, which was captured without a barlow lens, hence the smaller size image.

[Neil_104]

I have just compared your images to a sketch I made of Mars on 29 Dec and I can confirm that your C14 & camera has accurately depicted the surface of Mars that evening.

😆 Joking aside, very nice image!! I'm glad I was able to capture the main features in my C6 at 214x and it's great to see a more detailed image of what I was able to sketch that night. It seemed a pretty decent night for seeing (something I wasn't expecting given the wind and impending cloud). It's not often I'm able to push the magnification that much.

[geoflewis]

58 minutes ago, Neil_104 said:

I have just compared your images to a sketch I made of Mars on 29 Dec and I can confirm that your C14 & camera has accurately depicted the surface of Mars that evening.

😆 Joking aside, very nice image!! I'm glad I was able to capture the main features in my C6 at 214x and it's great to see a more detailed image of what I was able to sketch that night. It seemed a pretty decent night for seeing (something I wasn't expecting given the wind and impending cloud). It's not often I'm able to push the magnification that much.

Thanks Neil, indeed the seeing wasn’t too bad, but the wind was something else. Glad you got to see some of the detail that I was able to capture with the camera.

[Space Cowboy]

PIPP to the rescue! Very good effort in such difficult conditions Geof!

I'd probably need a ROI of several feet to cope with that kind of wind.🙂

[imakebeer]

Nice image @geoflewis👍

I've seen similar vertical horizontal marks in some of my own images from time to time, but hasn't realised the cause.

Question: Do you think there's any benefit to using PIPP in this way more routinely? So far I've only used it to merge zillions of JPEGs into a single AVI, not much of a surprise to learn it can do lots more. I suppose what you're doing here is using it to pre-discard bad frames that will later on get discarded (probably) by AS3!.

Also making a mental note to check out Winjupos to see what that can add for me 👍

[geoflewis]

1 hour ago, Space Cowboy said:

PIPP to the rescue! Very good effort in such difficult conditions Geof!

I'd probably need a ROI of several feet to cope with that kind of wind.🙂

Thanks Stuart, it was crazy really, but I was mostly disappointed that AS3! just saw the sharp edges when Mars drifted through the edge of the ROI as best frames / good seeing. Even PIPP still included some of them, but got rid of the worst, so the combination of PIPP and AS3! eventually got it done.

[geoflewis]

1 hour ago, imakebeer said:

Nice image @geoflewis👍

I've seen similar vertical horizontal marks in some of my own images from time to time, but hasn't realised the cause.

Question: Do you think there's any benefit to using PIPP in this way more routinely? So far I've only used it to merge zillions of JPEGs into a single AVI, not much of a surprise to learn it can do lots more. I suppose what you're doing here is using it to pre-discard bad frames that will later on get discarded (probably) by AS3!.

Also making a mental note to check out Winjupos to see what that can add for me 👍

Thanks. I'm new to PIPP this year (2022/23) as always thought it wouldn't add anything to my workflow, so I'm still finding my way around with it. However, how wrong was I about PIPP, I've used to both join and split videos, reduce/increase ROI, select small processing regions from full frame SERs (e.g. just Mars from it's recent lunar occultation), perform quality selection from a single SERs (as in this case) and multiple joined SERs, so there is lots that it can do and I bet I'll find more features as I continue to experiment. My biggest issue with it is the size of the files it generates, but otherwise I'd say give it a try....

WinJupos is great for de-rotating entire videos, or just TIFFs from already processed videos (which is how I usually use it) for fast rotating planets like Jupiter and really becomes almost essential if imaging in mono with RGB filters over an extended period, e.g. several minutes, but I find that it also allows me to squeeze a bit more out with targets like Mars, even with the colour camera that I've started to use this year. It can be a bit of a tedious process, but it is worth trying and not too bad once you get the hang of it.

Edited January 1, 2023 by geoflewis

[Space Cowboy]

2 hours ago, geoflewis said:

Thanks Stuart, it was crazy really, but I was mostly disappointed that AS3! just saw the sharp edges when Mars drifted through the edge of the ROI as best frames / good seeing. Even PIPP still included some of them, but got rid of the worst, so the combination of PIPP and AS3! eventually got it done.

I'm surprised PIPP missed some. You could always use virtualdub to remove those frames manually if you have some time to kill 🙂  Happy memories from the past when cams didn't produce so many frames 😉  One thought, did you check "normalize stack" in AS3?

[geoflewis]

Just now, Space Cowboy said:

'm surprised PIPP missed some. You could always use virtualdub to remove those frames manually if you have some time to kill 🙂  Happy memories from the past when cams didn't produce so many frames 😉  One thought, did you check "normalize stack" in AS3?

I thought about checking manually, but 120k frames per SER.....😱. Yes, I use 'normalise stack' at 70% in AS3! - is that a good or bad thing for this issue? 🤔

[Space Cowboy]

1 minute ago, geoflewis said:

I thought about checking manually, but 120k frames per SER.....😱. Yes, I use 'normalise stack' at 70% in AS3! - is that a good or bad thing for this issue? 🤔

Not sure but might be worth trying without normalize stack and the same in PIPP.  

Yep, thats the problem with high speed cams.

[geoflewis]

1 hour ago, Space Cowboy said:

Not sure but might be worth trying without normalize stack and the same in PIPP.  

Yep, thats the problem with high speed cams.

I've never had an issue with too tight an ROI previously, but then I'm not usually crazy enough to try and image in winds that strong. It was just that I wanted a better image of Syrtis Major whilst Mars was fairly full phase for me to try a high res full surface map, but I think the opportunity has probably passed now, unless I get a clear sky in the next few days.

[Kon]

Excellent image despite your conditions. Very nice to see how the ice cap has shrunk between the two captures.

The only time I have seen these squares are on my moon imaging, as I manually track, when it gets jumpy and I have not put it through PIPP. There must have been a few frames throwing off your alignment. 

Happy New Year and let's hope for better skies in 2023.

[Kon]

3 hours ago, geoflewis said:

I've never had an issue with too tight an ROI previously, but then I'm not usually crazy enough to try and image in winds that strong. It was just that I wanted a better image of Syrtis Major whilst Mars was fairly full phase for me to try a high res full surface map, but I think the opportunity has probably passed now, unless I get a clear sky in the next few days.

Regarding your high resolution map, when I did mine a few weeks ago the smaller Mars didn't seem to affect the alignment but you may need a few more images to build the missing part of the disc so I wouldn't stress too much about it (I feel you that you want to have the best possible).

[geoflewis]

15 hours ago, Kon said:

Excellent image despite your conditions. Very nice to see how the ice cap has shrunk between the two captures.

The only time I have seen these squares are on my moon imaging, as I manually track, when it gets jumpy and I have not put it through PIPP. There must have been a few frames throwing off your alignment. 

Happy New Year and let's hope for better skies in 2023.

Thanks Kostas, it’s the first time I’ve seen these edge artefacts, but then I would not normally try to image in such windy conditions and my AP1200 mount is so rock solid steady, that I can even bang it with my hand without losing the target. I was close to throwing them all away when AS3! wouldn’t play, then remembered PIPP so gave that a try, which worked after a couple of attempts.

Happy New Year to you too.

[geoflewis]

15 hours ago, Kon said:

Regarding your high resolution map, when I did mine a few weeks ago the smaller Mars didn't seem to affect the alignment but you may need a few more images to build the missing part of the disc so I wouldn't stress too much about it (I feel you that you want to have the best possible).

Thanks Kostas, I have lots of good images for some aspects of Mars, but very few that include Syrtis Major and those that I do have are not particularly good. I’ll give it a bit longer to see if I can get any more images of the region, then will go with what I have.