Dust Storm on Mars

Larry Owens,
Director, The Charlie Elliott Chapter of the Atlanta Astronomy Club

I've been an amateur astronomer for nearly 40 years, and I am primarily a planetary imager. I'm attracted to the prospect of contributing to the scientific community, and the practice of planetary imaging affords ample opportunity. With today's image stacking and processing techniques, it's possible for amateur astronomers to produce amazingly detailed digital images with relatively inexpensive cameras.

This report concerns an observation made on the morning of 19 October 2005. I got up at about 1:00 AM to roll the telescope out for cooling to ambient temperature (it takes about an hour for the optics to stabilize) and started imaging at around 2:00 AM. It had been several days since I had imaged the planet Mars, and I immediately noticed on the shimmering image of the planet on my laptop that we had an unusual dust storm.

I imaged the planet with two color cameras and a monochrome camera through IR (infrared), red, green and blue filters until about 5:00 AM local time. Using these filters with the monochrome camera produces the most important set of images for the scientific community. This is because the different wavelengths recorded through the filters separate surface detail from various levels of the atmosphere.

The next step is to process the images. I often do this during the day at work if there is time, so I can send them out to the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (ALPO). Processing involves using image enhancement software to extract data from the raw individual frames of a movie. This process often yields images that are incredibly detailed and contain information that could not be detected by the human eye looking through the same telescope.

My telescope is a Celestron CGE1400. This is a 355.6 mm (14 inch) Schmidt Cassegrain telescope. I use a focal length of about 14,000 mm to image the planets.

I use several cameras to obtain images, including a color and a monochrome Philips ToUcam. These are modified for astronomy and typically used as computer web cameras. I also use a Celestron NexImage solar system imager and an SBIG Astronomical CCD camera with filter wheel.

Figure 1 shows the 19 October 2005 dust storm image through filters.

Figure 2 is a photo of me by the telescope I used to take this image (I'm the first guy on the web page version).

Some of my other images of the planets can be seen here.