Mars at Opposition
Mars is at it's closest approach to Earth until 2035. It's still 39 million miles away though. This is my second attempt at capturing a planet and while its not as good as others I've seen I'm happy with the amount of detail I was able to pull out of the bright red dot in the sky.
Equipment:
Celestron CGEM Mount
Celestron Edge HD 800 Scope
ZWO ASI290MC Camera
Altair 60mm Guide scope
GPCAM2 Mono Camera
Acquisition:
Taos, NM: my backyard - Bortle 3
11:45pm, Mars high in the sky.
I shot 100,000 frames at 3 milliseconds averaging ~333fps throughout the imaging session.
Software:
SharpCap
Autostakkert!3
Registax
Photoshop
I began the evening polar aligning my scope with my guide scope/cam and SharpCap. After viewing some objects, and waiting for Mars to rise high in the sky, I put on a jacket, hat and set out to get everything ready. After locating Mars with the camera on my computer screen I fiddled with settings to try to get to 3 milliseconds for my exposures. I realized my focus wasn't perfect so I slewed the scope to a nearby star, Hamal. I used a bahtinov mask to get it as focused as I could and took the scope back to Mars. I got my setting dialed in and began to record. I did several sessions each being just under a minute of recording to get the 100,000 frames at 333fps. I then packed up and went to bed. - Today I used Autostakkert!3 to analyze each frame in my videos. I settled on one session that had high quality frames, since I shot so many I decided to really narrow it down to the best and told the program to stack the best 10%, or 10,000 frames. After stacking was complete I brought the outputted file into Registax. Using their processing tools I tweaked the histogram, color and then used the most powerful set of tools in the program, wavelets. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I know what makes an image "good". So I messed with each layer adding sharpness and de-noise until I got what I feel is a balance between resolution and not making the whole thing look like a digital artifact. I saved that as a TIFF and brought it into photoshop for some color tweaks, a bit of structure in Viveza and a last little bit of sharpness.
I present to you my take on Mars at opposition, 2020.
Mars at Opposition
Mars is at it's closest approach to Earth until 2035. It's still 39 million miles away though. This is my second attempt at capturing a planet and while its not as good as others I've seen I'm happy with the amount of detail I was able to pull out of the bright red dot in the sky.
Equipment:
Celestron CGEM Mount
Celestron Edge HD 800 Scope
ZWO ASI290MC Camera
Altair 60mm Guide scope
GPCAM2 Mono Camera
Acquisition:
Taos, NM: my backyard - Bortle 3
11:45pm, Mars high in the sky.
I shot 100,000 frames at 3 milliseconds averaging ~333fps throughout the imaging session.
Software:
SharpCap
Autostakkert!3
Registax
Photoshop
I began the evening polar aligning my scope with my guide scope/cam and SharpCap. After viewing some objects, and waiting for Mars to rise high in the sky, I put on a jacket, hat and set out to get everything ready. After locating Mars with the camera on my computer screen I fiddled with settings to try to get to 3 milliseconds for my exposures. I realized my focus wasn't perfect so I slewed the scope to a nearby star, Hamal. I used a bahtinov mask to get it as focused as I could and took the scope back to Mars. I got my setting dialed in and began to record. I did several sessions each being just under a minute of recording to get the 100,000 frames at 333fps. I then packed up and went to bed. - Today I used Autostakkert!3 to analyze each frame in my videos. I settled on one session that had high quality frames, since I shot so many I decided to really narrow it down to the best and told the program to stack the best 10%, or 10,000 frames. After stacking was complete I brought the outputted file into Registax. Using their processing tools I tweaked the histogram, color and then used the most powerful set of tools in the program, wavelets. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I know what makes an image "good". So I messed with each layer adding sharpness and de-noise until I got what I feel is a balance between resolution and not making the whole thing look like a digital artifact. I saved that as a TIFF and brought it into photoshop for some color tweaks, a bit of structure in Viveza and a last little bit of sharpness.
I present to you my take on Mars at opposition, 2020.