Gail Massey Images

Technical information about these pictures is as follows:

These 8 images were produced from video tapes I recorded during the summer of 2003.  The telescope was located on the front porch of my home in Goleta; it was an 8-inch Newtonian equipped with a Barlow lens, operating at F/21.  The camera was an Astrovid Planetcam CCD color analog video focal plane unit, running at 30 frames/second.  Its output was viewed on a small TV monitor and simultaneously recorded on VHS cassette tape using an inexpensive Panasonic recorder.  Each session ran from about midnight until dawn, with everything recorded.  Later, short periods of best seeing were selected on each tape, that portion was digitized using a Dazzle 150 video digitizer connected to my computer, and Registax was used to compile a single image from several hundred frames near the selected moment.  After filtering in Registax, contrast was increased using Photoshop, and each frame was cropped around the planet image to reduce the file size of the final JPG image.

The Martian south polar cap is seen in each image, as the southern hemisphere was tilted toward the earth.  Letters A through G in my names of the images indicate a sequence of Martian longitudes, increasing systematically from A through G.  I arbitrarily began the sequence at the longitude showing the triangular dark feature Syrtis Major, because most people recognize that feature and it was the first discovered.  It also ends the sequence, indicating that the whole globe has been circled.