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Post by brianb on Aug 30, 2009 18:11:39 GMT
The weather made a mistake last night, it was actually clear for a bit (between midnight and 5am). Just before packing up as it was coming light, I swung my CPC1100 round on to Mars, which is starting to become visible at a reasonable altitude ... it's still very small (around 6 arc seconds) but the gibbous phase and some surface detail was clearly seen.
So the new apparition of Mars has begun!
It will be an "unfavourable" opposition (Jan 29th) as Mars will be near aphelion, making the disc rather small even at opposition, but at least the planet will be nice and high in the sky for those of us in northern temperate latitudes.
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Post by Paul Evans on Aug 31, 2009 9:53:05 GMT
Several members of the public were asking me about Mars, specifically if it's true that at the end of August it will appear as bright as the Full Moon! No, of course it won't! Here it is - upper left- close to M35 (very faintly visible) in this widefield of Orion taken while I was waiting for Shuttle Discovery to come past - this was 0515 BST from Newgrange....  Orion's in the sky, Winter can't be far away now! |
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Post by brianb on Sept 9, 2009 6:44:10 GMT
First image: Seeing was poor and it was impossible to get good images in green or blue, so here's a monochrome Mars:  2009 September 09, 0440 UT, Celestron CPC1100, 1.5x barlow, Astronomik Planet Pro 742 IR pass filter, Imaging Source DMK41 camera. L=358 degrees; North is up. Looks like there is a dust storm in the northern tropical area near the sunlit limb - Chryse/Xanthe area. |
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Post by Paul Evans on Sept 9, 2009 8:04:43 GMT
You've done well to get that much detail at this stage Brian, and yes, that looks like a big storm just above 9 o'clock there!
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Post by brianb on Sept 12, 2009 13:40:43 GMT
Thanks, but I did better today (12 Sep) - the seeing was variable but reasonable at times & I managed to run off a set of colour AVIs. I'm way behind on processing due to other commitments but found time to process the infra red image which I will use for the luminance channel.  2009 September 12, 0445 UT, Celestron CPC1100, 2x barlow, Astronomik Planet Pro 742 IR pass filter, Imaging Source DMK41 camera. L=330 degrees; North is up. The dust storm is just visible on the sunlit limb. |
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Post by Paul Evans on Sept 12, 2009 14:18:45 GMT
Very nice Brian - getting bigger and better!
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Post by brianb on Sept 16, 2009 12:16:19 GMT
Thanks ... but I've managed to better that considerably. Finished processing the AVIs from 12th September properly & assembled LRGB image:  |
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