The Focal Point, the magazine of the Atlanta Astronomy Club, has published a brief article about the experiences of Rich Jakiel, while capturing an image of Mars, using one of The Imaging Source's astronomy cameras.

The Focal Point writes:

A Stooge's View of Mars

Rich Jakiel took this photo on September 4th at 9:36 UT at the WiseGuy Observatory in Douglasville, GA.. The stats on Mars at that time were as follows: Diameter = 8.28″, Central Meridian = 314.5o, Phase = 0.86. The telescope used was a 12″ Meade LX200 at f/20 with a DMK 21AF04.AS camera with RGB (IR=L), 3000 frames each, 4000 for IR.

The seeing was poor to fair (a 4 out of 10), the transparency was a 5 out of 10.

Rich wrote, "Here is my first attempt at LRGB imaging of Mars. The disk is still quite small (8.3″) and markedly gibbous. The dust is now settling enough for the albedo features to become more pronounced.

This image uses stacks of ~3000 frames for RGB and 4000 frames in the near IR (>742 nm) for the luminance. I used my 12-inch LX200 at f/20, while the camera is the monochrome DMK 21AF04.AS.

The seeing was rather poor for most of the run, and after a couple miserable attempts at f/30, I dropped it down to f/20 (2x Barlow), and then later resampled the image at 150%. Image processing was done with Registax 4, Photoshop, IRIS and AIP4WIN 2.0."

Source: The Focal Point, Vol. 20 No. 5.