Aug 30, 2003: Mars -- central meridian approx 10 degrees

Tracy Davis took advantage of some good weather to get more pictures of Mars. He used the same setup we tried last week:

• Meade LX-200 12-inch telescope
• eyepiece projection, with Meade 12.5mm eyepiece
• Wratten #25 red filter
• SBIG ST-9 CCD camera at shortest exposure setting (says 0.06 seconds, but we don't entirely believe it) "
• crude aperture mask covering about 50% of the aperture

Tracy took several series of 100 or more exposures, each one of which wasn't all that bad by itself:

Registax program to combine many exposures, discard the bad ones, and do a little sharpening. Here are some of his best images from the night.

Images taken at UT 04:00, 04:13, 04:24. In the first picture, the central meridian is about 0 degrees.

Images taken at UT 04:45, 05:00, 05:15.

This final image was taken at UT 05:45, when the central meridian was about 25 degrees.

Compare the area within the box in our final image (on the left) with the same area imaged by HST, at nearly the same time. The middle frame shows the HST image, blurred with a gaussian about 0.2 arcsec (about 140 lm) in diameter; the right-hand frame show the original HST image.

Actually, you might want to look at the full-size HST image ; visit the STScI web page for the August, 2003 opposition to see additional HST pictures, most in color.

For more information

As always, go to the Marswatch page and browse through their images page to see some really great pictures.