Mars -2020

Imaged at San Diego with a C11Edge telescope with a ZWO1600M CMOS camera through ATIK RGB filters.

The Jupiter project season was passed, so I had some free time to image Mars near its closest approach. We had a lot of nights with poor seeing due to the weather conditions, but Mars was much higher than Jupiter. I typically took 100 images at 0.05 seconds exposure through each filter, then automatically changed filters and repeated the process to get a few dozen RGB trios. I used AutoStakkert! to sort the images in each group of 100, then combined the best 10%. I converted the RGB images in MaxIm DL, then used its Lucy-Richardson sharpening routine, followed by some light histogram stretching. The movie here includes the best one or two images per night, showing some fine details on the rotating planet when it was large, and almost no images as the planet moved further away. The movie pauses for 2 seconds on each image.

Click on the image to run an AVI movie file.

Telescope: C11, prime focus at F/10, giving 0.28 arcsec per pixel. Start date October 13, 2020 (Mars 22 arcsec diameter). End date December 16, 2020 (Mars 12 arcsec diameter). Used a ROI 640x480 pixels to save storage space. CMOS at 12 bit resolution downloaded images with under 1 msec overhead.

Red exposures: 0.025sec, 0.030 sec, or 0.035 sec.

Green exposures: 0.050sec, 0.060 sec, or 0.070 sec.

Blue exposures: 0.065sec, 0.080 sec, or 0.100 sec.

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Web page last updated March 25, 2021.