MARS 2003
MARS on 17June 2003.
First Mars image for this season. Celestron 14 + Televue Barlow + Philips ToUcam Pro webcam.
The image was obtained around 02:30 UT from a 360 image AVI file, of wich 39 images were used to stack the final image (using RegiStax).
Picture Window and
Photoshop were used to adjust the RGB layers to compensate for
atmospheric refraction and to sharpen the image. The drawing on
the right is a simulation/reference from T. Ikemura, Japan (c).
The biggest difficulty was seeing. The planet was always rather low in the sky. I also didn't have the right PC to enable me to take much more webcam-images in a short time period (1 to 3 images per second only). It is remarkable that an image under better seeing conditions made in South-France with a 100 mm refractor shows equal (or better...) detail than my much larger Celestron-14 used in Belgium!
Below or the few other images I made in 2003:
