Digital Astrophotography - Mars

Another Saturday and another chance to get a really big animation of Mars - and, at last, I've struck lucky as a huge area of high pressure gives us crisp, clear nights with not a cloud to be seen.

This movie consists of 50 frames, each taken at five-minute intervals starting at 21:18 GMT and finishing at 01:23 GMT on the 13th. The limiting factor was the hard disk space available on the laptop (and the frigid state of my tootsies). Each frame was derived from a 600-frame AVI movie processed in Registax.

It was very noticeable how the air stabilised after about midnight as people stopped opening their doors and went to bed. When this happened, the currents of warm air subsided and the image of Mars through the telescope improved markedly. This is easily seen through the length of the movie.

It was Guy Fawkes night here in Britain and I was sitting outside surrounded by a constant noise of fireworks exploding. I was hoping to get a good, long run of frames to make a decent animation. In the event, 13 frames, spaced five minutes apart produced another animation of only an hour before the clouds rolled in.

By combining all the photographs I took this night into an animation, I could show Mars' rotation over the course of about an hour.

2005 has, to me, seemed like having had much more cloud than previous years. As Mars came around for its 2005 opposition, I was beginning to despair of getting a chance of seeing through the ever-present layer. With two weeks to go to the best planetary positioning, my chance came. This image was stacked from an automatic selection of frames. Right in the centre is Planum Meridiani where the Rover "Opportunity" is still racing towards a crater called Victoria.