Mars from the 26th Jan

[legion48]

I've not been having much fun with astronomy lately. My SC1 Toucam won't work with my Windows 7 laptop, my mono chipped SPC900 has packed up and my 8 inch reflector has been unusable since I tried to collimate it.

I've been seriously thinking about packing it all in. But then I managed to capture this with the few bits of working kit that I do have.

I'm very happy with this.

[DarkerSky]

Very good capture - and very much like the view I saw through the eyepiece last night. Mare Acidalium near the NPC really does stand out well. The darkness also seems to nick into the NPC's curvature a bit, which is again something I was starting to see last night. Good stuff

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Nice! Very good detail.

[neil phillips]

Its a good capture, quite tight, You ever tried k3 ccd tools, it defiantely shows a different perspective than registax, ultimately registax is more accurate, more sharper, showing finer detail. I proved all this to myself a while ago on jupiter.

But none the less K3 produces a very smooth, more natural presentation, its noise levels ( especially at x2 stack ) are more under control, which enables quite a bit of sharpening of bold details, before grain takes over. I like to process both k3, and registax for different perspectives. K3 often resizes smoother. at the expense of smear.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Interesting. I use K3CCDtools for acquisition, and only once tried stacking with it. Never tried the x2 option (will re-run some stuff shortly)