Mars is Back!

It’s been two long years since I last saw Mars in the night sky. This morning I decided to set my alarm for 3:20am because I’m insane. Thankfully the sky was clear and Mars was over 45 degrees in the sky, beautiful for imaging.

My recent Jupiter photos didn’t have quite as many video frames as I hoped, so for Mars I decided to turn on “Region of Interest” in Firecapture. This crops the frame to only the planet, but because of the smaller frame size you can take frames faster. In about 4 minutes I got nearly 15,000 frames.

For this image I did a 4 minute capture, 4ms shutter, at 300 gain on the ASI290MC camera. I also used my Zhumell dobsonian and a 4x barlow.

I am absolutely thrilled with this image. My previous attempts 2 years ago mainly got a red blob with some minor details, but at that time a dust storm also obscured most of the planet. This photo is beyond my wildest dreams, I can’t wait for Mars to inch closer and get bigger in that scope!

This image was stacked in autostakkert (top 20%), and then sharpened with wavelets in registax.

Lining up this somewhat fuzzy image with known maps of mars was somewhat difficult but I think I have it right, and in this image we can see Opportunity and Pathfinder.

Below is the reference image for the exact date and time my photo was taken, and I’m pleased at how well it lines up!

And here is a map I found online showing the locations of the landers and rovers.

My hope is that this summer and fall I will be able to take enough photos to recreate this exact map with my own photos. Obviously it won’t be nearly as detailed, but it will be mine!