[sac-forum] Mars Image and Movie

Hi,

I just posted a new Mars image and a new short movie illustrating
the seeing conditions that prevailed from my Back Yard this morning.

http://www.astroshow.com/ccdpho/ccdpho.htm#Latest_CCD_Images

The Mars image was created from webcam images using the Toucam
camera that was featured in the June 2003 Sky & Telescope article
"Shooting the Planets with Webcams".  It is sort of disgusting but it
made a better image than I've been able to make so far with my ST-7E... 
  :-)

The atmospheric conditions go a long way toward explaining why.  That is
what the movie illustrates - how bad seeing conditions really are.  You have
to shoot and stack a LOT of frames to build a half-way decent image.  Then
you still lose detail if the planet is bouncing around as much as it is 
in the
movie...  I had never before seen in real-time how much things were 
bouncing around...

One unresolved item is the chromatic aberration present in the image. 
 Top to
bottom, blue seems to be showing at the top of the image and at the top
of the ice-pack.  I have carefully done collimation.  I used an image 
registration
program I wrote to see if it was registration.  It was not.  Scope is Meade
LX-200.  Could it be the 2X Barlow?  That is the only other thing in the 
light
path.  Perhaps I will rotate it tomorrow morning and see if there is a 
correlation.

-- 

Thanks,

Howard     (in Tempe, Arizona)
http://www.astroshow.com

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