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Anonymous
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Last night the hurricane that past some 200 miles south of here resulted in near perfect "steady" seeing conditions for Mars. When I could see good detail at 400x through my 5" scope, I knew that a photo session was in order.
Date: 8/17/2003
Time: 0330 CDT (0830 UT)
Scope: 5" Frankie model Skyview Pro
Eyepiece: Scopetronix Maxview 40mm
Camera: Olympus C2100UZ (10x optical zoom)
Barlow: None
Exposure: 1/30 sec.
Focus: Manual mode
Filter: None
The attached image was made from a stack of 48 individual frames processed with Astrostack. Altogether, I shot around 400 frames. These are the best 48 out of the first 75.
I checked and tweaked the collimation as usual before observing. Visually, I could see some white around the North Pole. I doubt it was the polar cap itself. More likely, it was the "hood" of clouds that sometimes form there. A blue filter made this feature more prominent.
My past efforts have been with a 2x Barlow. I found that without the Barlow, the image brightness was enough that I could use a fast 1/30 sec. exposure, to better capture moments of clear seeing. Also, the eyepiece-camera combo was that much shorter, meaning that optical misalignment due to sagging was reduced. I took advantage of the quarter Moon to get an optimal focus. I also used the "digital zoom" feature of the camera (2.7x) to make the image larger in the viewscreen, though this has no effect on actual resolution. (The same pixels are illuminated either way. The digital zoon merely crops the outer portion of the image and expands the center to fill the space.) Using the digital zoom seemed to help me get a better focus.
The temperature was right at the dew point (was it ever!) and there was just the slightest haze in the air, which helped the steadiness. The Skyview Pro's job was made easier by the fact that there wasn't even a HINT of a breeze.
This might be about as good as I can do with this setup, though I have a few hundred more frames to process which may yield a slight improvement.
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Anonymous
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Something went wrong and the image didn't post. Here it is.
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Charles
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Reged: 06/12/03
Posts: 4111
Loc: Enterprise, AL
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Frankie,, with it raining over here for going on three days I just had to tinker. First off that is really a good picture and you caught some fine detail. What I really wanted to try and bring out is the left edge. It looks like you might have caught clouds coming around the horizon.
I brought your picture into Photoshop and spent 30-minutes with it to see what if anything it is. I'll work on it more tonight to see if I can bring out anymore detail, but I think you caught something really interesting. So here is your picture again.
Charles 
Edited by Charles (08/17/03 07:08 PM)
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Anonymous
Unregistered
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Charles, if you want to play some more, I'll send you the 48 raw images. I cropped the originals to 400x300 as I couldn't see processing all the surrounding black sky. In jpeg form, they are only around 5KB apiece.
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Anonymous
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One note to add to the above setup description. I used ISO 100, the lowest setting available.
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Charles
Post Laureate
Reged: 06/12/03
Posts: 4111
Loc: Enterprise, AL
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ISO 100 is good because it is slower and will not pick up noise as easily as the higher ISOs. You might change to ISO 200 becasue it is faster and in my opinion a better medium for Mars. I'll send you my email address in a private message and you can send me the files. I'm not guarnteeing any improvement but I like to tinker.
Charles 
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Charles
Post Laureate
Reged: 06/12/03
Posts: 4111
Loc: Enterprise, AL
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Okay The weather God has presented me a sucker hole and Bertha is on the Porch. Will it be a repeat of last night and turn Zero-zero before Mars clears the trees, or do I need to get the chainsaw out?
Anyway, like all aviators I'm a sucker for a sucker hole.
Mars here I come.
Charles 
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Anonymous
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Managed to pull out some more detail with better processing. These pics were taken at approx. 3:30AM CDT (08:30UT) on 8-17.
The first one (if they display in the order that I uploaded them) is a stack of the 10 best images out of around 100. The second is a stack of 43 images out of the same hundred, including the 10 best.
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Anonymous
Unregistered
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Darn it! It did it again. The images didn't appear in the post. Here's the first one, the stack of the 10 best.
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Anonymous
Unregistered
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Here's the stack of the 43 best images. Does anyone know how to post more than one image in a single message?
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Bird
Post Laureate
Reged: 08/07/03
Posts: 3866
Loc: Murrumbateman, Australia
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I think you'd have to combine them in photoshop or the GIMP into one image. Looks like you can only have 1 image per post.
Bird
--------------------
Deep Sky Optics 16" f/4 composite
Royce 16" conical f/4
Royce 14.5" conical f/5
Deep Sky Optics 13.1" conical f/5.5
PGR Grasshopper Express / Flea3 / Dragonfly Express / Dragonfly2
RedHat Linux + Coriander
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/
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