Mars in 2022
Mars on December 11 2022 between 9.56 UT and 14.26 UT. This video shows about 4.5 hours of rotation of Mars. Crossing the disk is the Syrtis Major, Sinus Sabaeus and Meridiani Sinus. The North Pole is at the top right but poorly visible. The beginning of the movie is blurry because the planet was low to the horizon – the Earths atmosphere caused significant degradation of the image. As the movie progresses, the planet is higher in the sky resulting in clearer frames. The movie loops forwards and backwards several times.
The image on the left shows Mars on October 16 2020. It shows the Syrtis Major and Sabaeus Sinus. The south polar ice cap is tilted towards Earth and is clearly visible, albeit very small.
Mars in 2016
The image below is a composite from several images derotated with WinJupos. May 16 2016
Mars in 2005
I obtained these images of Mars with a 31-cm Newtonian (12 inches) at between f/28-f/30 and a Lumenera SkyNyx 2.1M camera or Phillips ToUCam Pro webcam. I used eyepiece projection with a 9-mm Nagler eyepiece and either a True Technology IR blocking filter (for colour images), a W25 (deep red) filter for black/white images, or no filter for unfiltered light images. After acquiring the AVI of Mars, using QuickFocus or K3CCDTools, I used Registax to select and stack frames from the AVI. I used the wavelet filters in Registax, and unsharp mask filters in Photoshop, to sharpen the image.
