Sky this Week

Good conditions now and then for planetary imaging last evening. Image below from 10:22 pm MDT. Mars is now 10.6 arc sec across to our view. Image presentation is direct view, north up and east to the left more or less. Central meridian at 61 degrees. Mare Acidalium is the dark patch to lower right from the north polar cap. Solis Lacus (the eye of mars) just below center of the disk.

Clear sky, 2 mph wind, transparency very good, temperature 40 deg. F, 58% humidity, turbulence varied but probably around 6/10 for this set.

Equipment used was Celestron Nexstar 11 scope, LRGB filters, Televue 2.5X Powermate, and DMK 21AU04.AS camera. Recorded luminance channel for 100 sec at 60fps, red for 100 sec at 30 fps, blue and green channel for 70 sec at 30 fps.

Aligned and stacked with Registax5. Photoshop’s ’smart’ sharpen filter used this time. It seemed to much produce less noise and slightly better detail than using Registax wavelets. Image enlarged 1.5X.

Mars on Feb 16 at 10:40 pm MST. Clear, very good transparenty and quite steady skies again tonight probably around 6/10, temp.30 deg. F. Celestron Nexstar11, 2.5X Powermate, DMK21AU04.AS, LRGB filters. Shot luminance image at 60 fps for 100 sec, and then 90 sec for RGB channels. Aligned and stacked with Registax5, channels merged and enhanced with Photoshop CS4.