{"id":9270,"date":"2020-10-31T10:18:25","date_gmt":"2020-10-31T14:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/?p=9270"},"modified":"2020-10-31T10:26:45","modified_gmt":"2020-10-31T14:26:45","slug":"mars-2020oct30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/2020\/10\/mars-2020oct30\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars 2020Oct30"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nA good clear night, the first in a long time, albeit a little cold.
\nMars is now up high fairly early on in the evening, so we went out and imaged Mars from 20:45 to 21:12 EDT. The almost full moon was up and fairly close to Mars, so it would not have been a great night in any event.
\nAll of the images were overexposed, even though I progressed down from 13ms to 11ms. It wasn’t enough.
\nThere was a lot of skyglow from the Moon and so far I am attributing it to that.
\nTransparency was poor, seeing was average.
\nMars was 39 degrees altitude, an apparent diameter of 20.23 arcseconds, Magnitude -2.2
\nThe animation does show surface detail moving, so I am a happy camper.. the session worked.
\nThe partial dew shield I am using is a cardboard file folder cut on a diagonal. It doesn’t work well however as the equatorial mount can turn the telescope itself upside down and then the dew shield does not work at all.
\nTODO action item for today, build another one that is more fully symmetrical.
\nAlso, whilst imaging the almost full moon, I noticed a lot of hard dust spots on the images. Turning the camera, the spots did not move, therefore they are on the camera portion of the optical system, not the barlow or the telescope itself.
\nTODO action item for today, clean the camera.. again.<\/p>\n

Lastly the animation of 8 observing runs, ranging from 30 seconds to 240 seconds.
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We went inside as the temperature had plummeted to -8C and we are not nearly acclimatized to that amount of cold quite yet.<\/p>\n

The next week looks much warmer and I am looking forward to getting out again as Mars rises even higher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A good clear night, the first in a long time, albeit a little cold. Mars is now up high fairly early on in the evening, so we went out and imaged Mars from 20:45 to 21:12 EDT. The almost full moon was up and fairly close to Mars, so it would not have been a […]<\/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-9270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9270","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=9270"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9276,"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9270\/revisions\/9276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starlightcascade.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}