mars eclipse (occultation) 12/7/22 aka 12/8/22 ~02:27 UTC

 On December 7th, both mars and the moon were in opposition--directly opposite the earth.  for the moon that means a full moon.  for mars it means the planet is roughly closest to the earth in it's orbit, so visually much larger and brighter than other times during the year.  since the planets in our solar system generally orbit in the same plane...the moon "eclipsed" (occulted) mars this year at opposition--an excellent photo opportunity.  

Mars emerging from lunar occultation
12/8/22 ~03:34 UTC
stacked composite

A different perspective:

Mars has risen
occultation egress
stacked composite

Same image, full scale crop:

occultation egress
stacked composite
full scale crop

Occultation start, 4x speed:

I used sky safari, to preview the location of mars at egress then, eyeballing the craters, navigated my narrow high power field to where I thought mars would appear.  Miraculously it appeared dead center in the field.  

Occultation end 4x speed:

Kudo's to the sky safari app

Imaging commentary:

The occultation occurred with the moon rising low in the east (6:30 PM local), so I had to move from my usual imaging location.  Unable to set up the night before, I had to bolt from work like Fred Flintstone at the whistle and set up from scratch.  polar aligned sighting thru the saddle at polaris, then 1 object align on mars.  did not have time to tune the ADC. Whatever settings I had last time were probably better than nothing.  

Used a lower gain and max histogram to improve the dynamic range.  

Processing was a bear.  Stacking software (autostakkert) could not handle my occasional field adjustments, so I wound up having to edit the video into smaller clips with PIPP, virtual dub, and photoshop, then process separately.  

The first two images are composites combining a stacked mars image, a stacked moon image, and a single frame.  

Image details:

12/8/22  ~02:27-03:34 UTC

eastbluff, CA

celestron 11" Edge HD

ZWO ASI 290MC (one shot color camera)

ZWO ADC

baader IR/UV block filter

12 fps, 1.844 ms, 152 gain, 100% histogram

isolated mars after egress

56 fps .924 ms, 251 gain (only 41%, should have been higher)

This was my second time using the celestron CGX which has some nice ergonomic features for rapid set up