Mars - C8 EHD First (planetary-) Light - 20221226 2245

Admittedly, this is the second planetary light I captured with the new C8 EHD (see my previous post on Jupiter). But that do you do when you have a first single night of Clear sky after months of cloud cover, and this happens to coincidence with the exact moment that your new rig is ready … ? Right, you try to take as much advantage of that as possible. I hope you allow me to can count all the images of that faithful night as ‘first light’

Following my first capture of Jupiter, I had also tried a couple of takes with Barlow, but for some reason a dust spec or other had entered the imaging train and was causing a serious halo’d artefact on the images … I should’ve checked the imaging train before continuing … pity

Jupiter was dropping towards the horizon and the seeing in the night sky was getting worse. Lots of moisture in the air. I didn’t know how long I would still have the chance … so, I switched to Mars.

I captured several images of Mars, a lot that I still need to process. Luckily no artefact in the processing on these images, it seems the dust spec had disappeared from the imaging train. Similar to Jupiter, I also tried out the Barlow 2x, although that was really pushing it with the seeing.

A single image processed with Barlow 2x, can’t say I’m unhappy with this result … in spite of the severe seeing. Surface features becoming nicely visible. The image still a bit ‘flue’, the eastern rim is lighting up due to my wavelet-processing, not sure if I’m applying the right wavelets. I guess the next step is to combine several shots in WinJupos to try and get this ;ore (crystal-)sharp

I’m still looking for a way to be able to identify and name the surface features in the image. Not sure if this needs to be done manually, or whether some kind of software exists that allows mapping (guess not … but I know a man who can tell me. I just still need to ask …)

Frozen in time: 20221226 2245
C8 EHD, ASI462MM, UV/IR, EQ6-R Pro
240p, 10ms G215, 180s, Barlow 2x
AutoStakkert, PixInsight

Happy with this ‘planetary’ result … finally putting al of the learning into practice to obtain a ‘decent’ result. Although, still a number of questions I’m struggling with ...
- How does one determine how many frames to stack in AutoStakkert? My rule of thumb has been: all of the frames that have a better quality of 50% ….but, is this the right criterium?
- I 'stacked' 5 processed images in WinJupos, but that didn't really yield a better result. Still searching how I need to improve on this.

Any constructive guidance is welcome

Clear Skies everybody! 🤩✨🔭

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