Mars comes to opposition on 7 December 2022. The following are pictures taken with a Skywatcher Esprit 120ED APO of 840mm focal length (F7) but with a Televue barlow lens attached (either x2.5 or x5). The camera is a ZWO ASI924MC Pro colour one shot camera.
Mars Occultation – 8 December 2022
I decided I would try and capture the occultation of Mars by the Moon with my Skywatcher Esprit 120ED APO (that’s a 4.8 inch refractor). The telescope works at F7 so I included a x2.5 Televue Barlow lens taking it to F17.5 so as to get a bigger image of Mars. The camera was a ZWO ASI924MC pro all supported by a Skywatcher EQ6-R pro mount.
I set up the mount the night before and polar aligned it (it has a built in polar scope which makes alignment easy) and covered it with a big bag to stop it frosting up.
The occultation started at 4:58am, so I got up at 4am and put the telescope on the mount and connected up the laptop. I did a couple of dummy videos to make sure everything was working.
The big image of the Moon is the raw video and has only been debayered using Pipp software. The video provides a perspective of how small the apparent size of Mars is compared to the Moon – Mars=17 arc seconds; Moon=1800 arc seconds.
In Pipp you can crop the video, so I used that to create the second zoomed in video, however, that would not have given a very good quality result. I therefore used AutoStakkert to export the 1200 frames of the video to tif files. I then took successive groups of 20 frames and selected the best 30% in each group and stacked and sharpened them using AutoStakkert to create a single frame. This gave me 60 frames.
Using Registax 6 I applied wavelet processing to the 60 frames (Registax has a batch processing tool making this quite fast) and then used Blender to build the final video.
Have your sound turned on – the orchestra was expensive – they wanted double time for a 4am performance
Mars – 25 November 2022
