Mars

We took a few pictures of Mars with a 7-inch Questar and an ST-5C CCD camera.

Focusing turned out to be the bottleneck; aiming was also hard. We do not think good quality is attainable without improving the hardware.

Authors::

• Meghan Oswalt and Morgan Weldon worked out the hardware and took half of images.

• Sarah Karp and Lori Simpson helped take the other half.

Images taken: Nov 8 & 10, 2005

Telescope: Questar 7 in at f/14 (f=100in) in the parking lot, image scale was 0.6 as/pixel.

Camera: SBIG ST-5C CCD

 Exposures: 0.09 sec blue, 0.01 sec red, 0.03 sec green. The best 95 frames were selected and co-added out of 4,000 frames.

Image processing: CCDoops + Registrax + Photoshop CS.