Lunar occultation of Mars, ingress - 2023-01-30
I didn't think I was going to be able to see any of this occultation. It had been cloudy most of the day, but the clouds started to thin in the evening. Because of the forecast, I hadn't planned to go to campus to try to photograph it from there. Instead, as I saw I might be able to get something, I got my Coulter Optical 10" Dobsonian out of the garage and held my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra up to the eyepiece. The eyepiece was a 14 mm ultra-wide FOV from Meade. I started taking video, trying to hold my phone in place while nudging the scope along.
There were plenty of parts of that video that were unusable, and there were still a lot of high clouds. After chopping up the video to get segments to run through AutoStakkert, I settled on these four times. From left to right, these represent the view at 2023-01-31 043346 UT, 043505 UT, 043600 UT, and 043601 UT. The first two are stacks of about 100 frames, while the last two images are stacks of about 10 frames. That makes the longer stacks a bit over 3 times less noisy than the shorter ones. Compare the details in the craters and mountains in the first two images with the last two.
The two most prominent craters in the image are Copernicus in the south (toward the bottom) and Plato in the north. We also get about half of Mare Imbrium and half of Mare Serenitatis. One thing that stood out to me is the one illuminated mountain beyond the terminator. It looks like this is Promontorium Laplace, a 2.6 km high peak at the edge of Sinus Iridum.
After stacking, I did sharpening in PixInsight, then used Photoshop to align the images in this arrangement.
Lunation: 9.32 days
Illumination: 74.5%
Distance: 393300 km
Altitude: 75°
Lunar occultation of Mars, ingress - 2023-01-30
I didn't think I was going to be able to see any of this occultation. It had been cloudy most of the day, but the clouds started to thin in the evening. Because of the forecast, I hadn't planned to go to campus to try to photograph it from there. Instead, as I saw I might be able to get something, I got my Coulter Optical 10" Dobsonian out of the garage and held my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra up to the eyepiece. The eyepiece was a 14 mm ultra-wide FOV from Meade. I started taking video, trying to hold my phone in place while nudging the scope along.
There were plenty of parts of that video that were unusable, and there were still a lot of high clouds. After chopping up the video to get segments to run through AutoStakkert, I settled on these four times. From left to right, these represent the view at 2023-01-31 043346 UT, 043505 UT, 043600 UT, and 043601 UT. The first two are stacks of about 100 frames, while the last two images are stacks of about 10 frames. That makes the longer stacks a bit over 3 times less noisy than the shorter ones. Compare the details in the craters and mountains in the first two images with the last two.
The two most prominent craters in the image are Copernicus in the south (toward the bottom) and Plato in the north. We also get about half of Mare Imbrium and half of Mare Serenitatis. One thing that stood out to me is the one illuminated mountain beyond the terminator. It looks like this is Promontorium Laplace, a 2.6 km high peak at the edge of Sinus Iridum.
After stacking, I did sharpening in PixInsight, then used Photoshop to align the images in this arrangement.
Lunation: 9.32 days
Illumination: 74.5%
Distance: 393300 km
Altitude: 75°