Mars Imaged on October 6th, 2020

Here is Mars taken on October 6th, 2020 at its closest approach at about 38.6 Million miles from Earth. It will not come closer until the year 2035. So, don’t worry if you missed it, you can see it this close again in 15 years from now.

It was taken with a Celestron C11 11″ SCT Telescope from the backyards of Bucks County PA which is just North of Philadelphia. The camera use was a ZWO 290mm Monochrome camera using colored filters Red, Green and Blue. An Antares 1.5x Barlow was used to increase magnification to about 650x-700x. The Channels were combined in PhotoshopCC and the frame rate was about 250fps and I used the best 5% of the stacked frames. The image then was processed in PIPP, then stacked in Autostakkert3 and then brought into Registax6 and then back to Photoshop for the finishing details.

I added an extra Red channel as a Luminosity to overlay the Compiled planet in post processing. So this color pattern is known as (R)RGB. The extra red added more detail to the image because most of the light coming from mars is in the Red Spectrum. So most of the planetary details come from the Red Channel. the Blue channel captures the Atmosphere and the Green Channel adds just a little bit to the image. in fact you can image mars with just Red and Blue if you know how to mix the colors right.