Purchase prints or Follow Me
Purchase fine prints, metal prints, and special orders of select prints from my homepage.
Follow me on Instagram @bortlexastro for blog updates and more images.
Mars ranks somewhere in my top imaging targets, first due to its distinguishing red hue in the night sky, and second due to the wealth of science that continues to come from the hard working folks at NASA/JPL and all of the supporting public and private institutions that have made it possible to explore the surface of another planet with autonomous robotics, magnetometers, and imaging systems. This year was its opposition year (every 2 years, Mars makes its closest (and therefore brightest)) approach to Earth relative to their mutual orbits. Many astrophotographers have captured and presented beautiful images of Mars this year - the best coming from 10-14”+ aperture telescopes which capture amazing detail - and mine above will not compare, but as many of my blog posts elude to, it’s the amazement with the best image or view we can get, and the excitement of progression that keeps amateur astronomers going. I could not image at the opposition day, because of weather primarily. I then took multiple nights of images in conditions of “average” seeing or worse (which in astronomy means…..pretty crummy atmospheric turbulence), hoping that the fast frame rate using the “lucky imaging” techniques that nearly all amateur planetary astrophotographers use would make up for the seeing conditions (well, it didn’t). I then realized the 8” SCT I was using required recollimation (a process in which the secondary mirror is re-aligned with the primary mirror using a simple 3 point mount on the secondary mirror) - you basically defocus on a bright star, where you true up the secondary mirror obscuration in the defocused airy diffraction pattern (will let you look that one up - but basically imagine a donut where the donut hole is off center, and you center the hole in the middle of the donut by turning one of three screws in a 3 point mount). Finally, on Christmas Day, the atmosphere calmed enough to be above average in seeing, and I was ready with newly collimated scope. For the December 25th image, I took 15,000 frames at 143 fps (7millisecond exposures) in 16 bit RAW format on my ASI462MC dedicated astrocam. I ran image quality analysis in freeware SW, which I windowed the ideal frames down to 1652, stacked them, post processed them in Photoshop (adjusting exposure, color, denoise, high pass filter to bring out edges, and increased the resolution using a commercial AI based image processing software). One of the coolest things to me is that, to my best estimation using comparison with the Mars Globe app on iPhone, we can see a geographic feature where the MSL Curiosity Mars rover is located - I believe the top tip of the C-shaped dark area with the open side of the “C” facing SW in the image is where the Gale Crater is located, and where Opportunity did its 14 years of science. Lastly, to close out the Mars entry, I couldn’t help but post the fuzzy single frame from the occultation as Mars tucked behind the moon back on 7th of December. I could not do a higher fidelity stack, using my freeware, due to the objects (Moon and Mars) moving relative to each other frame to frame, and the CMOS Sony chips in these cameras are not optimized for low noise single frame exposures (they are optimized for many frames stacked plus calibration frames).....but, still a fun view if you don't look too close at the detail.