MARS

28th July 2003 - 03:30

Technical details: Tal-2m + Philips TouCam Pro and Tal X2 Barlow + Baader IRB filter. 300 frames captured K3CCDTools. Brightness 75%, Gain 0%, 1/50sec, Gamma 0 - 200 frames stacked using Registax. Image aligned using AstroAlign program. Image resized X2 and unsharp mask applied in PS7. This is a vast improvement over my previous attempts. Increasing brightness and reducing gain really helped to eliminate the 'Blue Halo' effect. Setting Gamma to 0 helped with the contrast of the surface features. Mars is now 21.65 arcsecs in diameter (getting bigger all the time!). Phase is 95%. At time of capture Mars was at an elevation of 24deg and was 0.4323au from Earth.