another try at mercury

detail on mercury is still on my wish list.  unfortunately, the goto on my failing mount is not up to mid day imaging.  so i gave it a shot as it set near the horizon.  seeing was pretty bad at low altitude.  a low pass IR filter pulled out the planet, but no evidence of detail. 

Mercury 5/4/22 02:56 UTC

processing notes:

for reasons which escape me, my stacking software (autostakkert) was completely unable to distinguish bright, but totally distorted frames (which were the majority) from a well defined crescent.  as i result i had to manually select approximately 200 frames out of 8,651.  a process made even more tedious by a windows update blowing all my work about half way done.  needless to say, this one sat on the hard drive for a while.  finally made it thru all the frames, but alas, didn't get anything more than a crescent, no detail.  to be expected i guess with such poor seeing.  

prior attempts

image details:

camera ZWO ASI 290mm IR pass filter 850
celestron 11" Edge HD, no barlow
8651 frames @75 fps 6.085 ms gain 351

upsampled ~2x
5/4/22 02:56 UTC (5/3/22 ~8 pm local)
East Bluff, CA
poor seeing, IR filter helped