Mars

Well, we had a break in the clouds, but I knew it wouldnt last long.  I've been wanting to try the new scope out on a planetary object.  Lemme see, I had a choice of Mars, Jupiter or the moon.  Being I only photographed Mars once before, and it didnt really come out too good, I thought I'd go ahead and try to get Mars thru the new scope.

I ran across a problem in Registax.  I took 2 AVI's, one was about 3000 frames, the other 2000 frames.  The 3000 frame one would not load, no matter what I did.  I ran it through VirtualDub, and I even tried opening it in Registax 5, but no joy.  Therefore, the only image I'll post is of the 2000 frame stack.

This is the full frame.  I believe northeast is up.  North polar cap is there.  Some dark markings, but I'm no mars expert.  This is the first time I have even SEEN mars thru a telescope that I can remember.

I used the C6-NGT to take this image, 750mm with a 3X barlow into the Quickcam Pro 4000 webcam.  Seeing wasn't too good, it appeared to be bouncing around a fair amount on the screen.  Transparency wasn't too bad while the frame was shot.

Here is a resized image using the same AVI

I was actually somewhat surprised that I was able to get this much detail on this object, considering it is only in the neighborhood of 14 arc seconds across.