The Moon Blocking Mars!

On Monday, January 13th 2025 the Moon moved directly in front of Mars, blocking it from view. This happens every once in a while, but it’s rare enough that I’ve never actually been able to catch one before. My forecast was clear but with bad seeing, that’s good enough for me to try!

I though I’d try for a zoomed in picture to try and get some detail on Mars, if I needed I could do a zoomed out version when Mars emerged from the other side of the moon. My images came out so well that I decided not to try the zoomed out version.

For about an hour before the even I experimented with exposure settings, after doing a full setup with careful focus and collimation. I wanted to make sure both the Moon and Mars were both exposed correctly. I ended up using a 2ms exposure, 250 gain, and a 3x barlow.

This image was a stack of about 80 using autostakkert, then sharpened with Registax wavelets. Some final color correction was done in GIMP.

The entire event only took a few minutes, so I took a video of the entire process. While hand tracking was difficult, I was able to get the whole thing. I used PIPP to align the images using some texture on the moon, and then I stacked batches of 17 photos. For each stacked photo I did the normal wavelets sharpening, and did some batch color correction in DarkTable. The resulting animation is a bit choppy, but very cool.

I’m thrilled with how this animation came out, though I’m sure someone better with photo editing software could get Mars to pop a bit more red though. Also, this animation really looks like old film footage, this is probably my hint to clean my telescope and lenses!