Gallery XVIII

Mars

        Well, Mars is at its closest approach in 60,000 years and I'm working the night shift. So Jeff Ball kindly accompanied me to the Donald C. Martin Observatory at Huntington High School to help me try to image Mars with the school's C-14, which has recently been remounted on a Losmondy Titan mount with Gemini controller.

The color images were made with a SAC IVb camera. These are 80-150 frames (out of 900) shot through a Televue Powermate 2.5x. These have been shrunk to improve their appeal. Stacking was done with Registax. The last is the best. data from the runs used to create these images was later reprocessed with Registax 2 with better results (see bottom of the page).

These B&W images were shot with an Astrovid Stellacam and represent about 50-80 frames. The first 3 are with the Powermate 2.5x. The last was shot prime focus with the C-14. Compare these to the SAC IV images further down the page which have not been shrunk. The pixels on the SAC IVb are about 1/2 as big as those on the Stellacam. Also notice the dirt on the Chip, Powermate, and diagonal mirror.

I reprocessed 2 data runs with Registax 2. There were with quality level set to 90%. I pushed the red data in the LRGB mode. Mild wavelet. Then scaled to 50%.

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