On October 13th, 2020 Mars will be at “Opposition” which means it will be as close to Earth as it will be this year. But on top of that, because this is happening closer to winter than summer, it’s position in the sky will be much higher overhead which means less atmosphere to look through making this the best opportunity to see Mars for fifteen years!
Needless to say, I want to get a picture! Trouble is, photographing the planets is hard, and although there are a lot of ‘big picture’ similarities to taking deep-sky photos it’s also quite different in many ways with completely different shooting and processing procedures. The planets are really small, bright targets too so that’s another interesting challenge.
Essentially you use a really small camera, as much telescope magnification as you can muster, take 2000 real fast exposures in a minute, and then sift through them all to see if you ‘got lucky’ by snapping a photo when the Earth’s atmosphere was still for a split second along your telescope’s line of sight to the planet. Hopefully, you can get a hundred or so decent frames our of the 2000 this way that you can stack into your final image.
This video details the equipment setup I was trying to put together for this and then what happened when I got it out to try and use it which was pretty much all bad! So I go through what went wrong and what solutions might be available to me.