Another Mars shot from the Obsessionator!

Well, my new best friend and I were out observing again last night / this morning.
Boy was it COLD!
Again I have to say how just plan awesome it is to see a huge scope like
Daves 20'' slewing around effortlessly and more to the point, with total accuracy.

So, under an almost full Moon there was not much to observe other than it and of course Mars & Saturn.
Dave got som good prime focus shots as far as I could see.
Hopefully if they came out ok he'll let us have a look!

We got a good look at Tuttle and it is VERY faint indeed.
We gave Mars another go with the webcam.
This is a very rushed result because we only managed to capture 4 good 2min AVI's because my laptop ran out of juice.
:evil:

The wind didnt help either as it made it feel even colder and it also
rocked the image around a bit in the webcam.






The colour here I think is a bit beter than the first image,
There is something strange happening to the overall shape of the globe here too,
In regiztax it;s fine but I think it's something to do with the fact that
the image is saved and resaved several times as a jpeg and in 8bits.
Any ideas?

Also I did a comparison with Hubble (while I was adjusting the colour)
Long way to go yet!!



Thanks a million again to Dave for the chance to try this.

Which one is Hubble??

Nice work lads!

Which one is Hubble??

Nice work lads!

I have to say,
I'm probably a bit over excited with these shots and posting up
stuff Dave would prefer me not to (he's the biggest self critic I've ever seen!)
I suppose it's a good thing.
He keeps telling me we'll get better ones....

So Dave,,,
When are we going to Barbados!?

How does this image compare to what one could see in the scope?

I think taht shot overall, is slightly better than the previous regarding sharpness, the seeing last night was reall good!!!

the image is saved and resaved several times as a jpeg and in 8bits

Yep, I had that too ocassionally, I think that every time you resave an image in jpeg, each pixel is merged with adjacent ones, resultin in a '4 in 1' pixel, which really affects the image. Something to do with the maths, try if you can to save in TIFF, as no detail is lost, =when all your processing is done, you can finally save in jpeg last

Merry Christmas!

Keith..

Frank,
Its just that I think the scope is able to capture alot more, I keep thinking of that night we had captured Saturn earlier this year. One unprocessed frame from that night was better then what I would have normally got out of a stacked AVI !

I also have the Mars AVIs from last night and will try and get something else out of it.
The seeing was good last night, better then the previous night this week but I wouldn't give it A1.

Like Frank said, the scopes tracking was excellent as was the GOTO, it placed Mars near the edge of a 9mm eyepiece after slewing nearly 180 degrees, I'm very happy with that.

One more thing Frank, I was surprised that the 6 hours of use almost completely drained your 20AH jump starter battery supply, I had just bought a 17AH one from Maplin and returned it today as it would even die quicker especially as I'll be putting dew heaters on it in time, I knew this was one thirsty system but I didn't think it was that severe. It was a good experiment and now know what I need to get.