| The Mars opposition of 2003. This was my
first attempt at photographing Mars with a 3com WebConnect webcam at the
prime focus of my f/15 7" LX-50 Meade Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope.
The pros suggest that the webcam be set to finest resolution. When I
did this, I got horizontal lines, appearing as a raster scan problem.
When setting the camera to medium resolution, the problem went away; so,
that's the setting I used for the rest of my photos. All of these images were stacked using Registax 2.0. Since the atmosphere refracts the Red, Green, and Blue channels by differing amounts, the color shift option was used to compensate for this effect. Wavelets were used to increase the sharpness. The files so created were then further processed with Corel Photopaint 9 using the unsharp mask, tone curve, hue, guassian blur and contrast. All of these are eyeballed for best iamge |
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Time: 7/27/2003 1:00am PST Stacked Frames: 60 Note that these are the same photograph with the contrast and intensity on the right one turned up. |
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| Left: 7/27/2003 1:05am PST Stacked Frames: 58 Right: 7/27/2003 1:28am PST Stacked Frames: 168 The camera settings were not changed so as mars rose in the sky and got brighter, the photographs became overexposed. |
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| Notice how the polar region is sharper in the upper images but the rest of the surface details are less sharp compared with the bottom images. It is difficult to get both areas sharp simultaneously. | |