Mars | 9.25.2020

Mars will be at opposition on October 13th, but its already so bright in our sky and only getting brighter. I planned to use my planetary camera to get an up close view, but I had some technical difficulties last night. So I did what I often do, shoot the heavens with my 500mm lens!

 

Equipment:

Celestron CGEM Mount

Nikkor 500mm f/4 P Ai-s at f/5.6

Sony a7RIII (unmodified)

Altair 60mm Guide scope

GPCAM2 Mono Camera

 

Acquisition:

Taos, NM: my backyard - Bortle 3

14 x 60" for 14 min of exposure time.

5 dark frames

15 flats frames

15 bais frames

Guided

 

Software:

SharpCap

PHD2

DeepSkyStacker

Photoshop

 

My mount was polar aligned with SharpCap (what an amazing system for aligning). I'm not comfortable using my SCT as my lens yet. My solution is to piggyback my Sony a7RIII and adapted Nikkor 500mm f/4 P Ai-s on a ADM dovetail rail on the top of my optical tube. I used DeepSkyStacker to combine all frames and then processed the TIFF file in Photoshop. I stretched the 32 bit file just a bit, and sharpened quite a bit to make the diffraction spikes stand out. I brought it into Lightroom and used the selective hues to make Mars the color I wanted, a bit of texture added and then export.

Done