Mars at its brightest

[rdking647]

right now,and for teh next couple of weeks Mars is at teh brightest its been in 10 years. tonight its visible as a bright red "star" to the right of teh full moon

these are a couple of shots i took last night

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Nice work!

[Mira]

2. Two thoughts:

how in the heck do you do that? Your work always astonishes me - the results make me wonder and think.

Also: I look at this planet and it seems such a perfect place for Trump, the color is inviting, too!

[rdking647]

3. telescope

first thing you need is a telescope,even a cheap one. mine is a celstron 127 that i bought for $350 off craigs list.

then you need an adapter to hood the camera to the scope. they are about $20. you also need a remote shutter release.

in some cases (the moon for example) you can hook the camera up directly in which case the scope becomes a giant telephoto (1500mm in my case).
for this i used an eyepiece and hooked my camera up to the eyepiece.

then i shot video. for something like the moon video tends to work better than still shots,unless you take a zillion stills. The reason is as the atmosphere moves thee will be moments when the planet is clearer or fuzzier.

After shooting the video i use a free program called lynkenos that takes all the individual frames from the video aligns them and analyzes them for quality. then i use the program to stack the best frames giving a clearer image before sharpening etc.

In this case it is the best 20 or so frames out of 850 or so (i shot about a 30 second video)

[elleng]

4. GREAT, as usual!

LIVE broadcast this Saturday evening!
The Blue Moon meets the Red Planet—just as it comes closest to Earth.

http://ltrk.co/q/s/yw6Xl

Rain all day and night here.

[alfredo]

5. Very good.