Conditions: average seeing, clear sky, no wind, very cold (-12C)
Setup: Obsession 18" Dobsonian telescope with 4x Televue powermate (f/18), manual filter wheel with R,G,B and Schuler Ix (>780nm) infrared filter, Lumenera Skynyx 2-2M camera. Here's a view of the imaging setup in our front yard. My good friend, Henrik Bondo, is standing to the right
Processing (Registax, Photoshop): out of ~2500 images in each sequence I selected and stacked the best 1000 frames for RGB and the best 500 for IR, wavelet sharpening, scaled up 120%, color balance adjust, curves and levels adjusted. The final image is a composite of the IR and RGB images.
Incidentally, this image was aquired at nearly the same time as another Danish imager - Jens Jacobsen - was photographing Mars with his 16" scope. Check out his great image to compare the results of our totally independent paths. The final result is very much an individual work of art - I like Jens' image for its resolution, smoothness and slight limb darkening effect.
This was my first imaging session with the manual filter wheel, which is really a must when the total time limit for doing all four image sequences is ~10 minutes due to the rotation of Mars. Consequently, I allocated two minutes pr. sequence. I repeated each RGB-Ir series four times in the hope of catching some moments where both the seeing and my focussing were good. An overview of the resulting frames is given below:
The sharpest R,G,B and IR frames are circled in red. However, due to the rotation of Mars I must use four consequtive images for the final image (within a 10 minute time span). The final image is based on the four images circled in green.
Here's my main page where you can see more of the pictures I have taken so far.
Comments greatly appreciated! (mikael@leif.org)