Mars, Dust Storm clearing! 14th Nov 2022 @ 00:01 UT, Meade 12" ACF SCT @ F10, Skyris 236 Mono camera

Mars through one of my telescopes, 14th November 2022 at 00:01 UT, telescope is a Meade 12" ACF SCT @ F10, using Celestron Skyris 236 Monochromatic camera, captured in Sharpcap 3.2, stacked in AutoStackkert 3, and with wavelets processing in Registax 6. (description continues below)

Taken from my back yard in St.Helens, Merseyside. Basically Mars is on it's side with North at the left (whoops, that's due to not knowing which way up to put in the camera lol), Mare Acidalium is on the centre left (towards the "top" of Mars), and Tharsis is upper left, Tharsis is a place where there are sometimes clouds, and I seem to have captured some white clouds in Tharsis. The Polar Cap should be visible on the far left (at the "top" of Mars) but is not really visible at this time.

Even about a week ago when I last looked, Mars needed a 12" scope to be able to just barely make out the dark surface markings, that is presumably due to the recent Dust Storm that shut down one of the NASA rovers. On this night however, the dark markings were fairly easily visible in my 8" F5 SkyWatcher Newton and my 12" SCT. The seeing was very good, steady views at the eyepiece. So it seems that the dust storm that has obscured my view of the dark surface markings for a few weeks now, is finally starting to clear!

I had to remember to choose "SCT" (mirror reversed left to right) in Mars Profiler Tool of Sky & Telescope's website (as well as putting in the correct date and time and timezone and Daylight Savings), and in Stellarium I had to choose the correct date and time and then copy the image into PhotoShop and then mirror reverse (horizontal flip) the view to match the camera view through my scope so as to compare the views.

Cartes Du Ciel showed the same as Stellarium, once I put in the correct date and time and horizontal flipped and then rotated the view. My SCT telescope mirror reverses the view left to right when used with a Star Diagonal (same as a refractor), and I had the diagonal in when I used the camera. The real view here doesn't quite match the simulated ones due to shifting dust and clouds!

The best view will be when Sirtis Major comes round, the famous V shaped dark marking, which I actually thought we had captured last night, but instead it turned out to be Mare Acidalium. If we had looked at 7AM UT on the same night (i.e. after dawn, early morning), we would have seen Sirtis Major.
Next step I think is to get a color Planetary camera, I just ordered a QHY462C from Bernard at Modern Astronomy, a state of the art color camera for Planetary use.

Скачать видео