Mars 'Bringer of War'

Reusing all of my movie clips I took on the 9th of April
Over 5000 frames stacked using Pipp, AutoStakkert,
Registax and APS.

'Mars Bringer of War' - I'm not getting anxious about World War 3 starting in the Ukraine; I'm just worried about Toot boxing my ears because I've spent so much time on this image, my eyes glued to my laptop and grunting when she speaks to me.  She has been working in the garden and I've been sitting on my butt. Justifiably, hostilities could break out at anytime in the next hour or so.

Anyway I'm quite pleased with this photo and as the weather has turned grim, there is very little chance I will gather many more photons from Mars before it spins off on its orbit. Since its closest pass to the Earth on the 14th April, Mars will apparently shrink and grow dimmer with every passing week.

In my image you can clearly see the North polar cap at about 1 o'clock, yellow-white carbon dioxide clouds along the eastern and western limbs and an isolated cloud in the upper middle of the disc.

The magenta coloured areas are albedo affects, where the winds on Mars have blown away the sand to expose  the bedrock. In reality these weathered and oxidised rocks are also red but show up as a contrasting colour because they reflect light in a different manner than the adjacent sandy deserts.

Getting the colours right on an astro image is quite difficult, particularly when the object you are photographing is very small and a long way away.  I think I find this less red version easier on the eye?

Olympus Mons is the largest shield volcano in the Solar System and is often  cloaked by clouds. I'm no Mars expert but I have done my best to annotate the brighter features in my image.

 

Annotated version of my image