{"id":9179,"date":"2020-09-27T08:11:50","date_gmt":"2020-09-27T12:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/?p=9179"},"modified":"2020-09-27T08:18:44","modified_gmt":"2020-09-27T12:18:44","slug":"mars-2020sept25","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/2020\/09\/mars-2020sept25\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars 2020sept25"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

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.
\nSo 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

My processing starts with running PIPP to centre and crop the video stream down to 500×500 pixels.
\nNext 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.
\nAt this point I stop and take a look at the images. Very disappointing and soft.
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

This is the last of the 11 runs and Mars had reached the lofty altitude of 22 degrees.<\/p>\n

I keep forgetting that Registax can do the worlds of wonder with wavelet processing.
\nI 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:
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":494,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/494"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9179"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9187,"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179\/revisions\/9187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}