From: Jim Chung <jim_chung@sunshine.net>

Date: February 12, 2010 9:23:18 AM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Sun & Mars

Alan,

Thanks for giving it that master's touch, I can see new detail in the polar cap!

I found that I had to go through about 200 sharpest frames and throw out all the ones I felt were blurry.  Some frames were so blurry that I don't know what features on it were confusing the software.  I guess I never encountered this problem in the past because I wasn't shooting at such extreme focal lengths.

Jim

Quoting Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>:

Hi Jim,

That is a fine mars image! I was going to comment that f62 is probably extreme... but you've pulled it off exceptionally well and with only 100 frames, the noise/detail quotient is very reasonable. The contrast of the albedo features is great and allows the atmospheric quality to come through. My eyes are a bit fried from staring at my own mars frames from last weekend, but I've tweaked your image just a bit to remove some noise and add a little brightness. The image is in the planetary folder in files just underneath your original:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/Planetary/MarsFeb11_tweaked.jpg

The sun images are a nice rendition as well - thanks for posting them.

best,

Alan

On Feb 12, 2010, at 3:12 AM, jimchung2338 wrote:

After some helpful insight from Alan & Milton, I reprocessed the solar images from the past weekend and they can be found here:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/Solar/SolarImages80mmPST copyb.jpg

Last night the seeing was somewhat better than average and I seized this as my last imaging attempt with Mars this year. I used an Antares 3x barlow and a barrel extension to yield a true f/62 or 12 m focal length image with my C8.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/Planetary/MarsFeb11.jpg

Jim