Stargazing Mars Occultation

[russ_watters]

TL;DR Summary

Observation of the Jan 13, 2025 Mars Occultation

Post your pics of the Mars occultation here!

Currently it's 8:20 EST, about an hour from the occultation. Below is a still of what I'm working on (the gray dot near the right side is Mars):

I'm using my C11, a 0.33 focal reducer and currently using a ZWO ASI1600 monochrome camera. It's the only setup with which I can shoot the entire moon with the C11. I'm going to shoot the "in" with this setup and the "out" at higher magnification and a color camera. The color camera has a much smaller sensor and pixels so it can't image the entire moon even with the focal reducer.

Zommed-in on Mars:

This is a 3,000 frame stack. Seeing isn't very good, so there isn't much detail to be had.

 

[russ_watters]

Well this ended up better than expected!

 

[Ken G]

Incredible photo, looks like a composite.

 

[russ_watters]

Incredible photo, looks like a composite.

It sort of is. It's not a single frame; to take high-res photos through the atmosphere you take thousands of photos and stack them, which cancels-out the atmospheric distortion. But because the Moon and Mars are moving relative to each other, stacking photos will smear one or the other. So they have to be processed separately and then re-combined, from one or a set of massive video file(s). But it is the same camera, same settings, about the same time, and the separately processed Mars is pasted over a smeared version of itself.