| The Mars opposition of 2003. Photographs were taken 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. 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, Gaussian blur and contrast. All of these are eyeballed for best iamge. |
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Left: Time: 8/1/2003 11:41 pm PST Stacked 33 frames. Right: Time: 8/1/2003 11:49 pm am PST Stacked 28 frames. |
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Left: Time: 8/1/2003 11:55 pm PST Stacked 73 frames. Right: Time: 8/1/2003 11:59 pm PST Stacked 45 frames. |
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Left: Time: 8/2/2003 12:14 am PST Stacked 80 frames. Right: Time: 8/2/2003 12:28 am PST Stacked 26 frames.
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Left: Time: 8/2/2003 12:37 am PST Stacked 48 frames. Right: Time: 8/2/2003 12:52 am PST Stacked 90 frames.
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Left: Time: 8/2/2003 1:12 am PST Stacked 63 frames. Right: Time: 8/2/2003 1:28 am PST Stacked 120 frames. |
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| 8/2/2003 1:32 am PST Stacked 100 frames. |
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| This collection represents the largest series of shots that I got on a single night. Unfortunately, the exposure and focusing on only one of the shots was near optimal (The one taken at 8/2/2003 12:52). On the first several shots the seeing was bad while the last few shots were overexposed. During overexposure, the bright red areas become white. When turning down the green and blue channels, the planet's surface can be made to appear true but the polar cap also becomes red. | |