Mars, January 27 - 2008

Conditions: reasonable seeing, clear sky, no wind, medium humidity

Setup: Obsession 18" Dobsonian telescope with 4x Televue powermate (f/18), Lumenera Skynyx 2-2M (with Schuler Ix infrared filter) and Lumenera Skynyx 2-2C (with IR reject filter) cameras. Here's a view of the imaging setup in my small garden.

Processing (Registax, Photoshop): selected and stacked best 300 frames out of 6000 for IR, best 150 out of 6000 for RGB, wavelet sharpening, scaled up 150%, color balance adjust, curves and levels adjusted.

This was the first time I used the big Dobsonian for imaging from my own back yard. The telescope is so big and our gate so narrow that it had to be lifted up and into the garden. That gate will have to go! The time between the IR and RGB sequences was 12 minutes - just short enough to permit a combined version. The angular diameter was 12.5" and the seeing reasonable; but not as good as on Jan. 9 where Michael Rask and I shot our sharpest image.


Here's my main page where you can see more of the pictures I have taken so far.


Comments greatly appreciated! (mikael@leif.org)