The big day has finally arrived.  Mars is at opposition.  This means that Mars is now directly opposite of the sun from us.  If you drew a line from the Sun through the Earth and kept going, you would end up at Mars.    Actually, Mars reached opposition early in the morning on 11/7/05 at 2:20 AM.

Mars will rise when the sun goes down and be high overhead at midnight.   It will rise earlier and earlier as the month goes on, too.  Now, I do not have to wake up early at some dreadful hour to image it!  LoL! 

For the image on this night, I decided something different needed to be done.  I thought about stacking my old 2x Barlow with my new one, but suddenly I had a better idea:  I took the lens out of a plastic Barlow lens that came with my nephew's Meade refractor and used it as an extension tube to increase the focal length of my system!   This made the image scale almost double. 

The image below is 100% of the original size that I captured it at.   Compare it to the image further up the page, which is also at 100% scale.

Olympus Mons is the largest mountain in the solar system.  It makes Mt. Everest look like a dwarf.  LoL. It is an ancient volcano on Mars that is seen better in telescopes when Mars is at opposition.

While Mars was at it's best and near opposition, I imaged it over the course of several nights.  I took eleven images from these sessions and made a movie that shows Olympus Mons rotating off the face of the planet.   It is the bright spot in the lower left quadrant of the planet.

Since the frames were made on several different nights, the color, size and angle of the planet varied a little.  But, I did my best to put them in order and line them up correctly so the movie would look half-decent.  Check it out: 

Saturn is now rising in the east in the early morning hours and is high enough to image from about 2:00 am till  sunrise.  I pulled another all-nighter and imaged Mars and Saturn on Friday night, Nov 11/12th, 2005.   Here is the image I generated with 800 frames from one AVI movie: 

Here is Mars on the night of October 12th, 2005.  I did some visual observations of the Red Planet early on.  From those I determined when the seeing got good enough to try for another image of Mars.  Unfortunately, by that time, the clouds were threatening and I had only a short imaging session because they eventually took over the whole sky. 

Here is Mars on the night of October 13th, 2005.  High wispy clouds were covering Mars, but they were so thin I was able to image through them.   The seeing was better than on Saturday night.

With the seeing so good, all 4 of the Tharsis Volcanoes are visible in this image.  Other surface features not often seen in images from scopes under 10 inches are also visible.  I have a comparison with a Calsky.com simulated image here, if you want to see how well I fared .  LoL!

Move your mouse over the image to display the volcano names.

The month of November is already more than half over.   Mars and Earth are getting further apart, so now is the time to try and get those final best images of Mars taken before it is too late. 

I went out on 11/17/05 and 11/18/05 and tried my luck at imaging the Red Planet again.  Unfortunately, a cold front had recently passed through, so the atmosphere was unstable and the seeing was very bad on Thursday, 11/17/05. 

On Friday, it was not much better.  Clouds were hampering my efforts at capturing a few AVI.  The seeing was still low at 3/10 or so, so I just imaged anyway despite the clouds.  I had to adjust the brightness and gain throughout the capture to maintain good brightness levels because of the clouds. 

I did not hold much hope for getting a usable image, but as luck would have it, I managed to get something after all.   Here is a stack of  790 frames from the last imaging attempt on Friday night: