Mars at closest approach on Monday night.

Unlike a few others who posted, I seemed to be lucky with the seeing on Monday night. Mars gave up a lot of detail.

Equipment is a C8 Telescope with 2x astro engineering barlow, ASI120mm camera and rgb filter set. 8000 frames each of red and green were taken with the best 1200 of each stacked in As!2. About 4000 frames of blue were taken with the best 800 frames stacked. Each channel had wavelets applied in Registax 6 and then the channels were combined in Photoshop CS2. Final colour balancing was then done on this image in Registax using the rgb balance function.

Superb detail, great work! The colour balance seems unusual for Mars, but is aesthetically pleasing.
Mike

Hi, John. This is exactly what I observed on Monday night with Valerie. Except my 6.2" apochromatic refractor has my east going right. But my north is up OK. It is because of my diagonals on the focusers. I have got used to it over the last 4 and a half years.
But I have to say what a most excellent image we have here. It is definitely up to your usual high standards. I can see the north polar cap, Mare Acidalium, Sinus Sabeaus looks simply magnificent, Mare Erythraeum is on the left southern edge. I have since discovered that the bright gap between these last 2 dark areas is called Aram -pure and simple. However it looked very distinctive despite its small size in my telescope on Monday night (14th).

Aubrey.