First of Mars 2022!

This year I bought a new 5x barlow lens to try and get the planets slightly sharper than I have in the past. Previously I was combining two 2x barlow lenses together, so my thought was removing some glass should hopefully make a better image. It doesn’t seem like that is totally working out, but the images are still pretty good, and fun to take!

We’re approaching Mars opposition and my plan was to take a new map of Mars. I don’t remember the exact camera settings I used, but I used roughly 4ms shutter speed and 350 gain. I stacked about 6000 frames in Autostakkert and did wavelet sharpening in Registax.

While I’m thrilled to see so much detail on the planet, it’s not enough to make a new map of Mars, and it’s certainly not better than what I achieved 2 years ago. So this year I’m abandoning plans of a new map of the planet, but I’ll probably have fun taking some new pictures.