Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

Mars Wednesday evening. It was unexpectedly somewhat clear, at least in the direction of Mars, last night. A lot of cloud all around, affecting other imagers to some degree.
This was a run of 8, approx 180seconds each, shorter for the initial run as usual.

Identifying features: I used to use the Sky and Telescope Mars Previewer, but it is finicky to time zone settings and often confusing. Since then I have started to use the

British Astronomical Association Mars Mapper. One issue I have with it, it does not seem to allow a north-south switch. I image with north up, it shows south up. I also looked at Stellarium, but do not believe it shows correct surface features for the time.

S&T Mars Previewer

Stellarium

BAA Mars Mapper

The southern pole ice cap shows a little. The lighter colour of the northern hemisphere is the Tharsus region, with Olympus Mons (not really showing detail). The darker southern hemisphere contains features such as Solis Lacus but again you can’t really identify in these low resolution images.
Of these three, the BAA is the only one to overlay names, which is very handy when you are first getting used to the topography.

Since then I have also started to use the Sky&Tel Mars Previewer again, this time setting it to UTC time. It seems to work better and I will go back to using it to compare what I image to what is supposed to be reality.

Lastly, the 8 images animated together:

Shadow transits of Moons of Jupiter on Jupiter are relatively common.
Double shadow transits are somewhat less common.
Seen here is the moon Io off to the right with two shadows, one from Callisto and the other from Io, also off to the right. The Great Red Spot appears only in the first few image runs, then goes around the edge.

The double transits and the Great Red Spot were to begin at 17:25 EDT but it was still daylight. The telescope pointing could not find Jupiter, not until 18:27 when Jupiter was visible to the naked eye and the Telrad finder helped aim the scope.
Images were taken every five minutes until the end of the event at 19:25 EDT. So instead of 2 hours, only 1 hour of images were captured.

Images runs were 180 seconds each and processed with PIPP, Autostakkert! and Registax for wavelets.
An animated .gif of the entire event is below:

There were great plans afoot to image the planets this long weekend: Friday Saturday and Sunday evenings.
Friday evening, the observatory was opened, the scope cooled down, and were just about to align it to Mars… when the clouds rolled in. And boy did they roll in. Could not see a hint or spec of Mars, at Magnitude -2.6

Saturday was better, albeit very windy. And the wind did not die down. I eventually closed 1/2 of the roof, which helped a little but not a lot. This is from the summary of all runs that night:

I called it very poor seeing and poor transparency that night.

Sunday night was better. Less wind, colder air but sill poor seeing and poor transparency. I had also removed the x2.5 barlow in favour of the x2 barlow, for better focusing and better contrast.

I made only 4 runs Sunday, each run about 20K individual images and used the best 5% of them to get this:

Finally! After two years since the last opposition of Mars, I had a great night of imaging it. I had previously done a few back in June but Mars was much smaller then.
So this past Friday evening, not a great night in that the Moon was up and lighting up the southern half of the sky. I had to wait for mars to clear the trees of the eastern horizon and that was close to 21:41 EDT. I did my usual 30 second run, then another 30 second run with firecapture’s autoalign feature turned on, getting a record of the seeing that night. Then I immediately launched into a series of 180 sec runs.. as many as I could before having to turn in for the night. Fridays, like most week work days, are very long days.

I am using the new firecapture 2.7Beta and am impressed but it. I have not yet figure out how to run a batch of runs but will sometime. I used an ROI of about 600×600 pixels allowing for a faster frame rate, yet enough room for Mars to wiggle about the FOV.

My processing starts with running PIPP to centre and crop the video stream down to 500×500 pixels.
Next is Autostakkert! 3 to stack the best 5%, 10% and 25% based on the analysis of quality done as the first step. It also expands the image resolution x1.5 to 740×750 pixels.
At this point I stop and take a look at the images. Very disappointing and soft.

This is the last of the 11 runs and Mars had reached the lofty altitude of 22 degrees.

I keep forgetting that Registax can do the worlds of wonder with wavelet processing.
I am using severe high level wavelets, to get the details to pop out. and boy did they ever. To the point that I thought most the image was noise artifact. But then when all of the images showed similar features, I knew it was good. I also put together the 11 runs of imaging to get this animated image of approx 31 minutes:

1st quarter moon was maybe 35 degrees away from Jupiter, the southern half of the sky was lit up by the moon with high haze.

Pointing the mount, big failure (unless Jupiter is straight down). Manually jogged over to Jupiter and then tracking was not bad (manual every 30 seconds or so). Using new Firecapture 2.7 beta! camera software with the zwo asi 290mc.

It’s not bad at all. better user interface, seems smoother, less glitchy than 2.6

No Great Red Spot in this image. North and south equatorial belts showing well, as is the equatorial zone.

As you may note, either transparency is poor or seeing is poor or both seeing AND transparency is poor! Just waiting for that once in a year timeline where we get GOOD seeing AND GOOD transparency on the SAME night!
Jupiter was 22.45 degrees altitude with an apparent diameter of 41.4 arcseconds at Magnitude -2.41
This was the best 50% of 2561 frames using 70ms exposures in a 180 second imaging run.
Focus remains quite soft using the x2.5 barlow. There was talk about adding a larger diameter knob to the focusing wheel for finer control.
The toonie sized 2 hole Hartman mask to aid in focussing does help but reduced the amount of light to levels that makes it hard to see if the image is in focus! Would work better on a larger telescoe.