Mars: Single-frame 10/30/20

[Hankmeister3]

The weather and night sky has ... I'm searching for the technical term here ... royally sucked the last several weeks, plus I was away on vacation to visit family down in the great Republic of Texas a week ago

Since I'm mostly a deep-sky kind of APer, I tend to avoid the parts of the month when the Harsh Mistress is glaring down upon our fruited plains. However, due to a sudden bout of cabin fever combined with an AP itch - despite previously driving 2600 miles round-trip to my old stomping grounds about 20 miles southeast of Houston and its five lane interstates and loops (what a mad house!) - I thought I'd try my hand at trying to grab some Jupiter and Mars images in hopes of further honing my planetary processing skills. Clearly, I still need to work a bit harder on those skills especially with respect to stacked images. I don't think I'm bringing out enough detail in my stacked images since they really aren't that much better than my single-frame images, especially with respect to planetary images. I do have more success with stacked lunar images. I'm not into video imaging yet.

Nice transparency and average seeing conditions were a welcomed surprise with the promise of even better seeing conditions after 10:00PM. Seeing conditions were something like Pickering 5 and possibly a bit better for four hours starting at around the time I threw in the towel. Unfortunately my feet were turning into popsicles despite four layers of clothing and two pairs of socks. Since I have a personal aversion to getting Mt. Everest-style gangrene from frozen feet, I broke everything down and was on the road by 10:35. However, I did get something like 500 images, combined, of Jupiter and Mars (Saturn was hopelessly soft and amorphous). I noted the car's temperature gauge was reading 32 degrees with a forecasted low temperature for the night of 28 degrees when I left my Penfield site!

Celestron SCT with UHD 10-inch f/10
18mm Baader Orthoscopic Eyepiece with 3-inch projection
Canon EOS 80D DSLR unmodded

[John Donne]

Hello Hankmeister.
You have had a nice outing and have captured Mars in minimalist fashion with respectable results.
Well done !

[Hankmeister3]

Thanks, John.

Busy day today with work on the house (I'm gettin' to old for this) and other relatively small projects I wanted to check off my honey-do list. But I was able to get about half-an-hour to go to a complete new set of 40 frames and was able to come up with this image of Mars. I culled through most of what I had taken last night and these 40 probably represent the best-of-the-best. I used Auto Stakkert and after running them through my ArcSoft PhotoStudio 6.0 this is the stacked image I was able to generate. I might have to try video at some point ... or get under better skies. This version is marginally better ... I think.

In the final analysis, however, planetary photography is probably not my "thing" though I might enjoy a little more serious lunar AP come Spring. Either that or I need to buy some electric socks!