...A Mars a day

As Mars is just past opposition (which was on the 3rd) and the skies were the clearest that they've been in some time I decided to have another go at imaging the red planet. With a disc diameter of only 14 arc seconds I had to use stacked barlows to get any detail at all but the seeing was reasonably good. This image is a stack of the best 500 of 1500 frames and shows the north polar cap, the bright Chaos region in the centre and the purplish Syrtis Major to the right hand limb. A challenging subject this opposition!

Below the main image is an interesting comparison of the visible surface features from the ephemeris generator "Winjupos"