Last night the sky was finally somewhat clear while I was near my telescope and had time. Saturn was still way to low at reasonable hours, while Jupiter was already behind the rooftop and lets face it, I have captured plenty of Jupiters lately. So Mars it was.

As I mentioned, the sky wasn’t really clear. There weren’t a lot of clouds but there was lots of smoke. Where I live (eastern Holland) people have the strange habit of lighting huge ‘easter fires’ in order to celebrate … ehm… wood? But yeah the piles of wood can be over 10 meters high and the smoke covers half the country. Although setting stuff on fire is among my top 10 favorite things to do, last night I didn’t really like the smoke 😛

Nevertheless I captured my best shot of Mars so far. There is definately some texture visible and if you want it bad enough, you could distinguish a bright-ish spot on the bottom which is one of the ice caps. For reference I attached an image shot by someone around the same time (Mars is slightly rotated), but captured with better equipment. That is, a 250mm diameter telescope, a guided mount and a camera dedicaded for astrophotography.

My best image of Mars so far

Mars last night shot by someone with more expensive equipment

I couldn’t get focus exactly right as I wanted to due to the poor seeing. Focussing with my telescope is a matter of slightly turning a knob, waiting for the image to stabilize, adjusting the mount to get Mars back into view, waiting again for the image to stabilize, see how good or bad the focus is and then adjust the knob again….. So it takes a while. Finally some Martian dude called Marvin made clear that I should stop spying on his planet (image below), so I went with the focus I had, shot a couple of videos and called it a night.

Some dude called Marvin who told me to f*** off

The first time I shot Mars, I got nothing but the orange blob below, so I’m pretty happy with my new best Mars 🙂

stack of 80 frames of mars through 90mm refractor on march 6 2014

23-4-14 edit:

I went kind of nuts on the enhancement sliders during the processing of mars. So I re-edited the stacked image, but this time a little more subtle. The outcome is way better than the mars on top of this post. See for yourself:

Mars 20-04-14 (re-edit)

Last night I was finally able to take a quick shot of saturn. Image quality was quite poor as you can see in the few frames that I attached. This had a large number of reasons: the ps3 webcam resolution is low, saturn was just above the horizon, it was windy outside and I was looking through an open window from inside. The last 3 all come down to turbulent air which distorts the view. Anyway, I stacked the 20% best frames and got a better image than I had of saturn (the yellow oblate blob on the background of this site). When I have more time, weather is comfortable and saturn is better visible at a reasonable hour, I will take my telescope outside, use the correct webcam for the job and spend some time to get quality footage.

For those of you that like to look up every now and then at night: Jupiter is the brightest white dot halfway up in the west, mars the bright orange dot high south-east and saturn the sandy-yellow dot just above the horizon in the south-east. In 2 months jupiter will be pretty much out of sight and saturn quite a bit higher.

Saturn with ps3 webcam and 3x barlow (stacked and edited)