Mars and its moons
Phobos and Deimos
animation of 2.5 hours on 11-4-05
from 4:45 to 7:17 UT
Phobos is to the
upper left of Mars and the brighter of the two moons, at magnitude 11 vs.12.1
for Deimos. Phobos disappears into the glare of Mars 3 frames before the end of
the animation loop. Orientation is celestial north up.
This animation was taken with my TEC140 refractor at about f/17 and a mono CCD
Philips ToUcam 740k webcam. Each frame is the result of a 2 minute, 10fps video
recorded at maximum exposure and gain for the moons which greatly overexposed
Mars, immediately followed by a 1 minute exposure at proper settings for Mars
itself. The properly exposed Mars images were then pasted over the overexposed
Mars images in the corresponding frames. There are 11 frames in this animation,
each depict 15 minute intervals.
The animation covers a 2.5 hour span from from 4:45 to 7:17UT Nov 4th. There has been much background noise
removal in this animation, largely to reduce the file size. For those who think
less processing is more and would like to see the original noisy version, it can be viewed here:
http://home.comcast.net/~jeboud/marsmoons_noisy.gif
