Hey Lowbrows and Astronuts—

Just to show what can be accomplished by a newbie with rudimentary imaging skills, 6” of top-quality apo aperture, unassisted manual focus and seeing that’s sub-par even for the Midwest, here’s my first-ever effort at imaging Mars. Best 5000 of 10000 7-ms exposures at 142 fps with ASI2600MC, stacked in Autostakkert!, wavelet-processed in Registax, and touched up in Photoshop and DeNoise with final touches by son Phil.

I wonder if the white overlapping the dark shapes at the edge of the cap is a haze coming off the cap.

For comparison, a Hubble image with almost the same central meridian (it’s the one on the right).

—howard