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John Nelson
Puget Sound, Washington USA
08/09/2020
04:15 am

Equipment Details:

For the Moon and Mars - Nikon D850 with Sigma 150-600mm lens hand held.
For Mars - 12" Meade LX850 telescope attached to 4x Powermate image amplifier, RGB filter wheel, Skyris 236M monochrome video camera.

Post-processing Details:

Processing for the Moon/Mars image basically converting the RAW file to a .jpeg file. Contrast, lighting and sharpening in Lightroom. EXIF: f/6.3, 1/400sec, ISO-400
The Mars Image - From three video sequences, one through a red filter, one through a green and one through a blue filter. Each sequence was cropped and centered in Pipp. Aligned and stacked in Autostakkert3. Wavelet processed in Registax6.

Image Details:

I had heard Mars would be "close" to the Moon on the night of 8 August. My plan was to capture an image through my telescope with the moon in the foreground and Mars in the background. Mars was in the same part of the sky as the Moon but it was way too far away from the Moon to capture it in the same frame using my telescope. Plan B...I used my telescope to get close to Mars and I used my DSLR with a 150/600mm lens to capture the Moon and Mars together. As it was, 600mm was about right for that shot. Even then, there wasn't much room left in the frame. I put the two images together to show the contrast. The moon is currently 251,000 miles away from Earth. Mars is currently 55.8 million miles away from Earth.