Photo of the Week for February 28, 2014

Andrew Kwon took this detailed image of Mars from his observatory in Mississauga, Ontario, on February 12, nearly two months before the red planet’s April 8 close approach to Earth. Although the Martian disc was only 9.9 arc seconds in diameter, his image reveals substantial surface detail, including the shrinking northern polar cap. Andrew used a Celestron 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a ZW Optical ASI120MM monchrome CCD camera equipped with infrared (IR), green and blue filters. Approximately 4,000 frames per channel were combined for the photo you see here. Andrew notes that using an IR filter instead of a red filter brought out details that didn’t show up in a standard RGB image.