Saturday 30 January 2010

Mars and the Moon, Mars and some Moon pieces.

A wonderful sight early on last night, with the full Moon and Mars lying near each other, low in the sky, against the deep blue of dusk. I got a couple of shots.

A shot of the full moon rising


And a little later the Moon and Mars


Very tricky exposure conditions, I really like the sky colour that's come through.

I also had a go at Mars last night. I've gotta say it's far harder than anything else I've tried so far. I guess cos Mars is so small..

Anyway, 1000 of 2000 frames, stacked in registax. I don't know why I've got an odd halo around it, I'm suspecting something to do with the little Mak, but I'm very pleased with this for my first attempt, it's got surface detail



I also had a quick play about on a couple of lunar features, again not easy with the full moon, with the 5x barlow (even harder)... each of these is about 500 of a 1000 frames.

Aristarchus


Reiner Gamma


And I think this one is Pythagoras

I have no intention of ever trying to do a full mosaic at this image scale, apart from being there all night, I do not have enough hard disk space to store all the AVI's...
Anyway, I used the Skymax 102 and played with different combinations of barlows... The best appears to have been a pair of 2x stacked. Focussing was really very hard.

3 comments:

square729wax said...

That's a good effort on Mars there John - you can definitely make out Acidalia Planitia and the NPC...

John said...

Thanks Ian, I need to go look up some Martian features. I'm very pleased as it was my first attempt at it

Demian said...

John, nice pictures.
I'm Demian from Argentina.
I want to buy a Sky-Watcher SkyMax 102 here in a local store. But first, looking for information, I did a search on internet and I found your blog.
Please could you write to me at demianpanello@gmail.com and tell me more about this telescope?. So I could realize what kind of telescope it is.
Thank you