Mars at its 2003 Opposition

19 Sep 2003	27 Sep 2003
4 Oct 2003	15 Oct 2003

These are my first attempts at photographing Mars. These photos were taken in my recently completed JaZ Observatory. The south polar ice cap is plainly visible along with the various dark surface markings. Each week Mars rotates enough to show many different features visible on its surface. It wasn't possible for amateur astronomers to make images such as these only a few years prior to taking these.

I used Mira, my Lurie-Houghton telescope, with a Philips ToUCam webcam. I was able to achieve an image scale of 0.15 arc-sec/pixel by using a stack of a Vernonscope 2.4X barlow, Meade 2X short barlow and a short extension tube in front of the camera. This setup is equivalent to a lens with a focal length of 7,630mm at a focal ratio of f/30.7. The images were processed with Rexistax to align and combine hundreds of frames from the video files produce by the camera. Photographs by Rick Scott.

Updated: 11 December 2011