All these pictures of Mars were taken at prime focus with a 10 inch Meade LX200 GPS telescope and a Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000.

This is my very first picture of Mars. The picture was created from one 10 seconds long AVI - taken at f/10. All its frames were stacked by the Registax freeware. Wavelet processing in Registax were also used. The pictures were then processed in Photoshop: contrast and cropping.

This early 'success' was encouraging. Mars has beatiful colors and some features can be glimpsed even at this low magnification. I 'fell in love' with Mars with this first picture. I will definitely concentrate on getting more and better images of Mars - to be taken at f/20 and (f/30 - when I get a 3x Barlow later on).

Lessons learned

I learned only on during the next week that a 10 second AVI does not provide enough quality frames to stack to create a higher quality final picure. However, for my very first attempt at webcam astrophotography, I am still quite please with the result.

I would recommend taking at least a one minute AVI captured at 5 of 10 frames per second to create a nice picture of Mars using a 10 inch telescope at f/10 (no eyepieces or barlow lenses used).

Mars is beautiful - definitely worth futher study.

Small is beautiful too - the image is not big, but its smallness makes it cute enough to compensate for that minor 'weakness'.