First shot at RGB imaging with a filter wheel. Mars

Finally got a chance to put my RGB filters to use on Friday night. (Very kindly supplied by Scopes and Space) It was a gusty night but managed to get a few lulls here and there. I used firecapture to record the avi moveis. Its very feature rich and works with a large range of ccd cameras, and best of all its free.

I captured about 80 seconds or so on each filter. I'm not sure about what the best gain and exposure settings are yet, these were just a best guess judging by eye. Each avi was stacked in As!2 with sharpened stacks (75% raw blended). Then each image (r,g and b) was opened in photoshop, the red channel image was given a little sharpening with unsharp mask. Then each image was pasted as a colour channel into a new image. This created a colour rgb image. I saved this as a png file and opened it in Registax 6 and performed RGB balance because the green channel seemed too strong. Next time Ill drop the gain on the green capture to avoid this.




Very happy with how this came out for a first try.

Link here: www.astrobin.com/85803/0/

It seems the north polar cap is quite tilted. Syrtis Major is most prominent. Is that Elysium in the 2 o'clock position? It is brighter than normal. Can anyone explain the large bright area at the south pole? What I have heard is the South Polar Cap should not be visible.

I am looking forward to observing Mars next month.

Clear skies, Aubrey.

I am answering my own question. The bright area at the south pole is the Hellas area.

Aubrey.

Hi John,

What a great image some amount of detail and great colour balance also.
Well done.

Carl.

Really nice image John. I guess that feature at two o'clock is a particularly large, bright orographic cloud over the Elysium Mons area.

Mike

You are right, Mike. It is Elysium Mons.

Aubrey.