Need Canon 10d tips on taking pictures of Mars.

[tkmckay]

Unfortunately I couldn't see Mars all night, we had some decent cloud cover and a thunder shower move in. I even drove out of the city about a hour to get away from the city lights. I will try it again tonight and see if my luck changes. Whats funny is the last week has been fairly clear skies until last night.....figures! :P

[tkmckay]

I have 2 pics I took last night/this morning posted here in koruvs topic.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by NHL

try a few shots of the moon first (since it's easier!) with a faster shutter speed starting with 1/60s... You'll see the detail and then you can gauge what to set for Mars.

On the night of 12-13Aug the Moon was close to Mars and I did some experiments with the pathetic little 100mm-equivalent lens on my Casio QV-5700, with very wide bracketing.

I set ISO800 (a mistake), but got a nice, very orange point image for Mars at 1/80th sec F/2. The Moon was hopelessly burnt-out at this exposure, but showed good detail at 1/1000th sec, f/8. So I calculate there's a 1:200 ratio in exposure for Moon:Mars.

If I get the chance to try again, I'll set ISO50 (16x slower), and 16x longer exposure. On a pathetic little digicam, the difficult bit is finding Mars in the viewfinder. It was easy when it was near the Moon.

I looked at Mars through a friend's approx 4-inch reflector a couple of nights ago. We could see a bit of surface detail, but couldn't quite make out the polar ice cap, because he's in the middle of a heavily sodium-vapour-lit town. I'll try & drag him & the telescope the 10 miles out into the countryside where I can see the Milky Way. However, it'll probably be cloudy here in NW England until June (Q: Which June are we talking about?)