From: Ron Pearson <ursamajor_1@mac.com>

Date: May 30, 2016 6:29:53 PM MDT

To: denverastro@yahoogroups.com

Cc: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Roger N Clark <rnclark@clarkvision.com>, yobryants@aol.com, Rocky Petrocchi <rocky.petrocchi@gmail.com>

Subject: Mars at closest in 2016.

Had a nice clear night here last night-this morning and seeing was predicted to be ‘good’ (CSC) around midnight, so I decided to try and image Mars on its closest approach of 2016, instead of imaging some deep-sky stuff.   The seeing was not what I would call “terrible” on my scale (swimming fuzz ball with no details), but probably somewhere in the Pickering “poor” range of the shallower end of the swimming pool.   So between midnight and 1am I shot several thousand frame sequences with PGR Scorpion video monochrome camera using AstroIIDC on my old MacBook Pro. 

So here is my sad attempt w/ 10 inch SCT @ f/ 17.6 w/Klee barlow.  I pulled out all the tricks to beat bad seeing (w/o adaptive optics systems the big boys use); monochrome hi-frame rate camera, image area reduced with ROI, IR pass filter, and binned 2x to get brightness and frame rate up as high as possible, about 60 fps.  Still with Mars at only ~29 deg. up, it was swimming around and tough to even focus. This is best of ~30 of 3000 images stacked and processing with AstroIIDC, color added in CS 3 (cause who likes monochrome images of Mars).  Couldn’t even get a nice round image but at least got the darker polar regions surrounding the ice cap (too small to get) and what looks like a ‘blemish’ left of center is likely the Olympus Mons ‘bulge' when compared with sim Mars image at that time.  

Anyone else make it out and try some imaging of our red neighbor?     Ron