February has been a terribly busy month for me so I haven't had much time with the scope and now it's raining. I did manage to get a couple of nights of imaging and experimenting without a barlow. I was impressed with the clarity I was getting natively on Jupiter. I'm not sure if it was the lack of a barlow or good seeing but I managed to capture this shot of Jupiter that had me questioning using a barlow for planetary.

Jupiter - February 2, 2025

But, once I got to Mars I quickly realized that although the no barlow experiment worked great on Jupiter because of it's size, Mars left me wanting more. I was impressed with the clarity as I was capturing frames, but once I processed the images, it just wasn't so amazing.

Mars - February 2, 2025

So I decided to head back to Jupiter to capture the Great Red Spot but by that time the seeing had degraded a bit so my results were not as sharp as earlier in the evening.

Jupiter - February 2, 2025

Jupiter - Earlier on - February 2, 2025

On the second night I was able to get out I decided I wanted to give my 1.75x barlow a shot. I'm usually using my TeleVue 2x PowerMate and thought a smaller barlow might give me sharper images. It did pretty good but not much different than the 2x. I may try out a 1.5x barlow I have in my stash when the rain goes away.

I also did a little experimenting with AstroSurface. I usually use AutoStakkert and Registax for my processing. I was a bit impressed with AstroSurface. Here are my results. I will need to play a bit more with it but I thought it gave me some promising results.

Jupiter - February 2, 2025

Mars - February 2, 2025