Mars 24th January from Sth. Oz.....

[Kokatha man]

Went up to stay in the van near some friends places in The Adelaide Hills here in Sth. Oz to visit, and relax, at a very small van park for a few days.....imaging wasn't the main priority but I got the gear out on the oval despite the presence of jetstreams.

Surprisingly good seeing given the predictions: because of my focus being elsewhere when packing gear to go there I left my compass at home that goes with my alignment device: had to plonk the scope down and stand behind it to see if it was pointing between Acrux and Achernar, dragging it into position for basic alignment .....also I'd recently bought a 12 volt hairdryer and erroneously reckoned the 120 watt option would be sufficient, and not pull too much current from the batteries.....I was plagued with fog and dew forming on the corrector plate towards the end of every avi: the pathetic hairdryer wouldn't pull the skin off of milk custard, and it took eons to remove the fogging every time, before I could start another avi.....and of course I'd also forgotten to bring the C11's dewshield, to compound the flamin' situation....!

But I managed about 10 avi's, and this is the first processed - I've radically altered parts of my processing regimen: this was one of the better ones from eyeballing the raw avi's.....though I think I have several that are better, especially the 30fps jobs where I have 12600 frames to play with (this is a 15fps avi.)

Still coming to grips with this new processing, which I stumbled upon purely by accident, playing around/experimenting - plus a little bit of commonsense thereafter: doubtless others are employing it but I didn't realise how simple it was to adopt (simple as far as the controls/options in R5 etc are to utilise this method for colour cams, that is - not so simple to get all the parameters/applications correctly weighted for an optimum image.....)

This first processing of avi #7 is my very first attempt with my new regimen.....hopefully I'll improve quickly and be able to do the 30fps avi's the justice I'm hoping they deserve....!

And I'm also champing at the bit to reprocess my best Jupiter images from last year's opposition!

Also a blue channel image enhancing the misting cloud over Mars' image in the RGB.....

Anyway, first image here and when I work out whether I'm awake or asleep I'll tackle the others - I'm dog-tired....!

[neil phillips]

was going to say someone, else awake at this ungodly hour, but your probably in the evening in australia. nice shot of the syrtis on the edge

[Kokatha man]

Mid to late afternoon here Neil, and thanks: you bagged a good'un too....!