Mars 7-29-2003 to 7-30-2003

The Mars opposition of 2003.  This was my second night photographing Mars with a 3com WebConnect webcam (at medium resolution) at the prime focus of my f/15 7" LX-50 Meade Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope.  All photos are at f/15 unless otherwise stated.  This was my first night with the Meade 3x Barlow, so some of the shots are at f/45.  Note that the seeing was not as good this night as on 7/27/03.

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

Time: 7/29/2003 11:50pm PST     Stacked Frames: 85

Time: 7/29/2003 11:55pm PST     Stacked Frames: 36

Time: 7/29/2003 11:57pm PST     Stacked Frames: 13

Time: 7/30/2003 12:03am PST     Stacked Frames: 84  The Right Photo was taken with a 3x Meade Barlow resulting in an f/45 shot.  Note that the original image was way out of focus but the final result is not so bad.

 

Time: 7/30/2003 12:06am PST     Stacked Frames: 72 Shot at f/45

Time: 7/30/2003 12:10am PST     Stacked Frames: 15 

 
Left: 7/30/2003 12:21am PST Stacked Frames: 214

Right: 7/30/2003 12:30am PST Stacked Frames: 13

 
This series of shots from upper left to lower right shows the rotation of mars from upper right to lower left over 40 minutes.  Notice that the sharpest image is the one with most stacked frames.