Hello Mars!

So the last week of March and beginning of April this year have been terrible for astronomy. I had begun to forget what a star looked like but on the 6th April the clouds finally decided to part and for a few hours at least the sky was open to me. I decided therefore that now was the perfect time to try and image Mars as I was only a few days away from when it was due to look its best for the year.

Thanks to imaging Jupiter in the past I now know a little bit about the settings needed with Sharpcap and was recording videos within 5 minutes of setting everything up. This turned out to be quite handy as it was already about 10.45pm by the time I got around to getting the webcam out and I needed to be up early for work the next day.

I was actually quite happy with how much detail I managed to pick up with my first attempt and therefore decided to give the 2x Barlow a go to increase the magnification.

All I can say is that there was much more detail here than I had expected to pick up with my Xbox Webcam. The darker regions are there to see on both the barlowed and unbarlowed image. Quite simply I am pretty chuffed with this and hope I get a chance to go out again and image it some more. I might try and take a longer length video next time although I need to read up on how long I can image it before planetary rotation causes issues..