Mars Syrtis Major (taster images) - 2nd/3rd Jan 2023

[geoflewis]

As some of you will know, I've struggled to get good quality images of Mars showing Syrtis Major this aparition, that I want to allow me to create a reasonably hi res map of Mars. Finally last night, I had that rare combination of a clear sky, with good seeing and light winds, so I sat outside with the rig for the best part of 4 hours capturing 22 SERs as Syrtis Major rotated across the Martian disc. I actually stopped for about hour between 11pm to midnight, as I need to go inside to thaw out.

Anyway, here are some taster images showind the first and last images from the session and one from about 1/3rd way through the night.

These are not fully processed images and the seeing and resulting surface detail fell away as Mars lost elevation. I'll de-rotate and combine some of them, to see if I can squeeze a bit more detail, before final tweaks in Affinity Photo. I'll probably post the final results on a separate thread, which given the amout of data to process might not be for a couple of days yet, but I am so happy to get some decent data showing Syrtis Major, that I want to share this taster.....

[Space Cowboy]

Glad you were able to take advantage of the better conditions last night Geof. They look promising.  I too got some decent shots. Sky was clearer than it's been for a long while and seeing wasn't too bad.

[geoflewis]

7 minutes ago, Space Cowboy said:

Glad you were able to take advantage of the better conditions last night Geof. They look promising.  I too got some decent shots. Sky was clearer than it's been for a long while and seeing wasn't too bad.

Thanks Stuart, I've done the initial processing of all the vids through AS3! and Registax, some better than others, as to be expected. I've also completed a de-rotation stack in WinJupos of the TIFFs of best 20k frames from 3 consecutive videos (so 60k frames in total), further wavelets in Registax and final tweaks in Affinity Photo. Here's that final image displayed both south (looking like Africa) and north up, alongside the previous best (also north up) that I'd captured for this aspect of Mars this apparition, which was in those crazy winds on 29 Dec...

It certainly is a good start to 2023....😀

[Kon]

Very happy for you! Your perseverance paid off. From the first 3 images, the top seems the best, but your final set are just excellent.

[geoflewis]

2 minutes ago, Kon said:

Very happy for you! Your perseverance paid off. From the first 3 images, the top seems the best, but your final set are just excellent.

Thanks Kostas, even though the seeing was good at times, it was still quite variable over the 4 hours, so some SERs were easier to process and gave good detail, wheras others much poorer. Even so, I should have enough good images to fill in most of the gaps in my hoped for map.