Order by: Trending (past 30 days)Date
Community photo entitled  by David Gray on 10/16/2020 at Perth, Western Australia

On 10/16/2020 01:04 am by David Gray | Website | Perth, Western Australia

I have recently embarked on the journey of zoomed mosaic space photography.
Finding that zooming into an object provides a lot more detail than would otherwise be achieved.
The challenge using this method of astrophotography though is the need for extremely short exposure times, simultaneously, with the highest practical gain.
Mars rotates rather quickly at one revolution every 24.6 hours, or 14.6 degrees of rotation every hour.
Because of this rotation, in order to capture and combine the most detail, the leading and trailing edges of the planets rotation require more attention than does its center.
To achieve my desired result, many videos were captured within a 45 minute time frame.
Although the videos were captured 16th October 2020 when mars was at opposition, the final processing and assembly was completed 12th July 2021.

Captured with a SkyWatcher 12" Goto Dobsonian Telescope,
3x Barlow lens,
ZWO asi183MC Astronomy Camera

Multiple still frames derived from stacking several high speed burst video captures.
Resulting stacked images then aligned and stitched to form final mosaic image.
Videos captured in SharpCap pro, stacked in AutoStakkert3, mosaic aligning, and stitching done in PS5.