Mars Near Opposition 2022

After my last imaging attempt of Mars I realized my new 5x barlow lens wasn’t going to produce a better map of Mars than I achieved 2 years ago. Because of that I haven’t been as excited to pull the telescope out to see it, but tonight the weather was clear and Mars is right about at opposition, I believe it was a few days ago.

I’m also still stinging a bit from missing the Moon passing in front of Mars a few days ago due to clouds. They may have won this time, but at least I got the ISS in front of the Moon this year finally!

Tonight I collimated, focused, and set my camera to 4ms shutter speed and 315 gain. This put the max of my histogram right around 40% which I’ve found to be a sweet spot with Mars.

I used the best 25% of frames out of 10,000 in Autostakkert, and this time I used Siril for wavelet sharpening. Siril did a NOTICEABLY better job than Registax this time.

This image is much better than my last one, though still not good enough to produce a better map. It looks nice when mapped in WinJUPOS, but my old one is still a bit better.

The white spot at the 1pm position near the edge of the planet is Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system!