Tuesday, December 11, 2007

For the 1st time: Planet Mars webcam astrophoto

This is the 1st time I tried to photograph a planet. In this case Mars. It is standing very close to Earth now. I made this picture using a Philips ToUcam webcam PCVC740K ("the egg") which I bought almost 7 years ago when webcamming was a hype. I never knew back then that this particular webcam is one of the most sought-after and suitable ones for astrophotography. This Philips webcam has a CCD sensor (and not a CMOS, like with many other webcams nowadays, which is 10x less light-sensitive). I put this webcam on my 200mm newton telescope with 1000mm focal length. By using a so-called 2x "barlow" (teleconvertor) I doubled the focal length to 2000mm. I made a 4 minute .AVI movie with 10fps, 1/250 shutter and the gain on 25%.
This particular picture of Mars is a composition of 34 images from a 4 minute AVI movie I made (so 34 good pictures out of 2400). The reason only 34 images were good is mainly caused by many turbulence in the atmosphere. I stacked the good pictures using registax (free software) and post-processed with Photoshop. The result is not bad for the 1st time. The small circle on the top is the Hellas region, the black line pointing down is Syrtis major.

No comments: