The rest of the webpage below is kept here to clearly show other astrophotographers the CRITICAL importance of calibrating their computer screens. Before I calibrated my screen the pictures much futher below down on this webpage looked quite acceptable. After calibration I saw how truly HORRENDOUS these images really are.

So I reprocessed these images on 15 September. It also became obvious then that the images I captured were not actually good enough to even show on my website. Luckily when I reduced the images of Mars 50 percent in size it became good enough for my website.

So the images of Mars directly below this sentence were all done after monitor recalibration.

            

From left to right and top to bottom:

• Stacked picture of Mars - directly from K3 CCD Tools (Green Mars)
• Most of the unnatural green removed from Mars (Yellow Mars)
• Some red added using Photoshop and a little bit of sharpening (Orange Mars)
• Much more sharpening done in order to show the maximum amount of detail (Red Mars)

From left to right and top to bottom:

• 1- Ideal for amateur astronomers that just want to take quick pictures of Mars - just playing around with their webcam

• 2 - This is the target you should strive for if you want to frequently add your pictures of Mars to a website. At least these pictures should have most/all of their unnatural green removed.

• 3 - This picture (bottom left) is the minimum standard for someone that wants to make their images of Mars avaible on a much more serious level. The picture looks good. It also has some detail visible.

• 4 - This picture is oversharpened somewhat to bring out the maximum detail. This type of pictures would be used by astronomers to study Mars. The purpose of this types of pictures is: to be of scientific value - cosmetic looks are a second consideration. It might even be that black and white images have significant value to them.

I am not trying to take pictures and process them to look as close as possible to what can be seen when looking through the eyepiece. I am taking beautiful pictures. In order for the pictures of Mars to be beautiful it goes through several image enhancement processes: increased contrast, reduced brightness, more visually pleasing colors. Noise is reduced and sharpness is 'artificially' added so that you can see more in the final image compared to when you are looking through they eyepiece.

So, if you take pictures of Mars and venture past the first image in this series you are getting into art. If you did your processing purely scientifically there would be definite, strict (exactly calculated) points where you would stop all you different image enhancement actions.

So, my answer to: What color should pictures of Mars be? is: beautiful.

Here are the ugly facts for the beautiful pictures shown on top of this page:

These images clearly show the main reason I am not 'guaranteeing' pixel accurate images on this website.

The image on the left clearly has more detail. OR is that noise? Is that detail or unsharp masked artifacts?

The image on the right clearly has less detail. OR ... since it is the result of stacking 250 frames instead of 150 it might also mean the lower quality of those 100 extra frames used blurred the quality detail as shown in the first image.

Until I am able to answer these questions fully I will focus on pretty pictures instead of research-grade pictures.

I am constantly striving to take better pictures and place most of my efforts on this website. Better means more beautiful. colorful, pixel-accurate, less noisy. Each of these aspects is a study all by itself.

Quite frankly I like my pictures to have a little bit of noise and grain - otherwise Mars would look like smooth and shiny plastic. Mars has dust, sand, rocks and grime. My pictures should be true to Mars' true character. In-focus pictures of dust should be somewhat grainy.

I know I touched on some philosophical points here so we are all entitled to our own opinions and sense of style.This is great since I frequently visit other people's websites to see how they unconsiously interpreted and applied much of what I touched upon on this webpage.

If everyone' s pictures of Mars were done exactly the same this would be truly boring.

I learned a lot about how I think about these matters while writing this webpage. You might learn a lot about these matters if you actually write down your thought as well. So you are welcome to write to me at

alwynbotha - - - at - - - webcam-astrophotography.com

with your opinions and views on these matters.