Mars 2022 Dec 09
It looks like both of us imaged Mars at very near the same time. I did x36 four minute imaging runs from 21:37 to 00:02 EST. exposure was 0.2ms ! wow! Registax has a filename issue when there are decimal points in the name, so I had to work around that.
Two places to identify features:
https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/plugins/observing-tools/mars_profiler/mars.html#
https://britastro.org/2022/mars-mapper-updated-for-2022
The BAA one seems to work a little better but cannot invert the image.
In any event, I start on Jupiter Friday evening and then whilst inside the house went to Mars and started, hence the camera also could/should have been rotated a bit to get north up but is off the the right.
The best shot I think is at 04:40 UTC = 11:40 EST, mainly due to altitude, an amazing 58 degrees! It went up as high as 71 degrees but seeing got a little worse.
I skipped the RGB autobalance in registax as it took away wayyyy too much red.
This entire sequence was the best 5%.. not to bad … 42K frames
So this is much like the quicklook at Mars I posted a couple of days ago
And finally, the 36 workable frames turned into an animated .GIF (2MB.. sorry folks!)
Looking forward to Monday evening… will not be able to stay up until midnight then, but at last 21:00 EST methinks. Mars will still get pretty high, and hopefully I will be barlow enabled. I decided to add back in the 90 deg diagonal until such time as the extension tubes arrive. It’s a good diagonal though… dielectric 99% reflectivity. On the downside another optical surface for dust to make spots!
