Mars 2020nov04
Mars on Wednesday evening during the weekly social chat videoconference. Now that we are on Standard Time, it is a little easier to get outside and image in the evening.
This is the BAA Mars Mapper simulation (their south is up, my south is down). It can be found here:
https://britastro.org/node/23843
I only wish they would add the ability to flip it to reflect my personal optics.
Sinus Meridiani is central with Chryse on the upper left moving to the right. The south polar cap is not really all that visible, and the bright spot on the lower right is the Hellas Basin.
I just noticed that the image of the telescope setup is old and incorrect. The 90 deg diagonal was removed some time ago. I will have to find a newer image to reflect reality!
Tracking continues to be so-so on the Meade LXD55 mount. Manual guiding corrections are needed every 30-60 seconds or so.
The new firecapture beta 2 is working well. I still do a 30 second no autoalign and then a 30 second autoalign, followed by 180 second runs with autoalign, then a 120 second wait, giving a cycle of 5 minutes from one imaging run to the next.
Lastly the animation of 9 imaging runs.
