Mars with a starter scope, adjust your expectations!

[themos]

I can't really use my 12" Dob for this so I've had a go with the 4.5 inches of silvered glass I bought for 65 pounds 3 years ago. There's a 2.5x TeleVue Barlow between the mirror and the venerable ToUcam. Capture was run by wxAstroCapture at 5fps. 200 best frames out of 3600 were processed with Registax 4. Time was midnight of 29-30 January 2010. Image scale: the 14 arc-seconds of Mars were talking up 32 pixels (0.44''/px) , pixel pitch is 5.6 microns giving an effective focal length of 2650mm (f/23). Seeing was better than average but not by much.

I've added calsky.com's simulation of a 5-inch view of Mars at that time

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Still got some nice detail there. Some fiddling with contrast could improve it a bit more.

[themos]

Just for future reference, here's the same data processed with IRIS