Astronomy Live | Capturing Mars in Motion @Astronomy_Live | Uploaded October 2020 | Updated October 2024, 22 minutes ago.
As Mars approaches opposition, I wanted to capture a time lapse that shows its rotation and its motion relative to the background stars. I used an 8" Meade LX200 and a modified Samsung SCB-2000 camera with a 2x barlow to capture a high magnification view of Mars rotating over 3 hours. I simultaneously filmed the red planet with an Orion ST-80 refractor piggybacking on the LX200 with an SBIG ST-2000XCM camera running 1 minute exposures to capture Mars moving relative to the background stars. Finally, I wrote a custom image stacking program in Python to stack the SCB-2000 videos of Mars in 1 minute segments in order to render a time lapse of the planet's rotation in sync with its motion relative to the background stars.
As Mars approaches opposition, I wanted to capture a time lapse that shows its rotation and its motion relative to the background stars. I used an 8" Meade LX200 and a modified Samsung SCB-2000 camera with a 2x barlow to capture a high magnification view of Mars rotating over 3 hours. I simultaneously filmed the red planet with an Orion ST-80 refractor piggybacking on the LX200 with an SBIG ST-2000XCM camera running 1 minute exposures to capture Mars moving relative to the background stars. Finally, I wrote a custom image stacking program in Python to stack the SCB-2000 videos of Mars in 1 minute segments in order to render a time lapse of the planet's rotation in sync with its motion relative to the background stars.
