2017-11-18, 06:41 AM
More with hope than confidence, I set up on Sunday night, 15th May 2016 to see if I could record the two moons of Mars; Phobos and Deimos. I expected Deimos to be fairly straightforward, lying some 60 arc secs from Mars but Phobos would only be 24 arc sec distant, bathed in the glare of the Martian disc. The seeing was very good and when the results came in, Deimos was unmistakable and I had a few grains of light as a promising candidate for Phobos.
After much image processing and stretching of the data, I was able to get everything to “pop out” in one aligned/stacked frame, including 4 field stars.
Taken with a Tak Mewlon 180 F12, TeleVue x2 PowerMate, Atik 414EX CCD camera, 20x4 sec exposures, 10:08pm AEST.
For the disc of Mars, I used a ZWO ASI224MC CMOS camera and overlaid the (re-sized) image over the grossly over-exposed Martian disc.
As usual ST3 provided the confirmation when I overlaid an ST3 screen capture and the plotted positions in ST3 precisely fitted the imaged positions.
Cheers
Dennis

After much image processing and stretching of the data, I was able to get everything to “pop out” in one aligned/stacked frame, including 4 field stars.

Taken with a Tak Mewlon 180 F12, TeleVue x2 PowerMate, Atik 414EX CCD camera, 20x4 sec exposures, 10:08pm AEST.
For the disc of Mars, I used a ZWO ASI224MC CMOS camera and overlaid the (re-sized) image over the grossly over-exposed Martian disc.
As usual ST3 provided the confirmation when I overlaid an ST3 screen capture and the plotted positions in ST3 precisely fitted the imaged positions.

Cheers
Dennis