I tried something different tonight in order to capture an image of Mars. I used my original Deep Sky Imager Color and attached it to my eyepiece projection device that I normally use with the DSLR. It allows me to project using an eyepiece onto the camera’s sensor. In doing this, it also allows me to enlarge the image by moving the camera further away from the eyepiece and adjusting the focus. It allowed me to capture this image of mars. I really had to work with the levels and contrast and stuff to bring out this level of detail. I believe it’s real detail and not just artifacts of my adjustments. Part of my problem though was that the eyepiece wasn’t very clean and so there were lots of smudges and bits of debris that would create shadows on the individual frames (this image is 300+ stacked frames). Because the image moved around though, I believe that those shadows average out over the image leaving the detail seen here. Or, I could be wrong. Tomorrow I’m going to try it again but with a cleaner eyepiece adn we’ll see how things compare.
As it is now, though, I’m really, really happy with this image.
