In contrast the first week of December somewhat thinned the clouds here and let me capture Mars on a number of nights around its closest approach in 2022. And on 6 December, looking at Meteoblue, I was attracted by the predicted combination of really terrible seeing indices in red, thin cloud and high jet stream set to arise at the very period I would like to image.
Sure enough, when I did foolishly image, this window of 6 December produced the pick of my runty Mars crop! In comparison the night of the 8th with the interesting Jupiter moon transits (but no Mars Moon occultation in Australia) started with horrid seeing as can be seen from the first image on the left. Earlier on the 3rd was not bad either but then only for a very short window. The 6th was the best so far for me in Canberra, even detected both moons of Mars that night for the first time this year. Yay! Times given with the images are Universal Time. Got a bit carried away on Dec 6 with almost the in focus detail on offer and generally stable shaped planet and so without changing the barlow for the difference in pixel size, swapped in my new non-cooled 533mm camera (intended for solar) and tried out a blue filter image to show clouds and a IR filter bypass for contrast. Results not too bad!
Still just missing out on my two favorite regions of Tharsis (apart from being able to view a higher altitude 31 degrees image from Darryls recent data download made available on his recent post) and the classic Hellas-Syrtis Major. Hellas is just starting to come into view here a bit after it gets dark but the weather seems to have moved again to cloud and rain.
