Astrophotography in Urban Environment

I was able to observe Mars this week end – after weeks and weeks of cloudy sky and rain. The seeing (between 4/10 and 5/10  on ALPO scale) was not as great as in November but  I am still very pleased with the result I got in average seeing condition with my Orion Maksutov-Cassegrain  7″ – a  mass production telescope I bought for less than $1,200 – and with my black and white Imaging source DMK camera.

Apparent diameter: 13.4″

Mars on 2/14/2010 at 00.43 AM PST – RGB Composite

I used registax 5 to combine about 2,000 rgb frames, and the following software :  Photoshop CS4, Focus magic, and sharpener pro 3.0.

I used a x2.5 Siebert optics barlow – and the picture was taken at focal plane at approximatively f/d 40.

Calsky.com rendition of Mars for same date / time is on the right.

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Mars  – 02/13/2010 at 22.33 PST – RGB Composite

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Rendition of Mars on  CalSky.com for the same date and  time.

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Red Channel                                 Green Channel                                    Blue Channel