Taken @ 12:22am MST (0722UT) on 23-May-2016. Although Mars was at opposition at this point, the red planet will be at its closest to the Earth on the 30th, but the size difference will be negligible, at best a few tenths of an arc-second. Current diameter is 18.4 arc-seconds (angular width). This was from the best 30 of 300 frames taken with the Celestron NexImage5 planetary imaging camera, Celestron 1100 EdgeHD telescope, no barlow, fl = 1960mm. Image scale 0.23 arc-secs/pixel. Video processed in ImagesPlus6.5 with RGB color channels split, aligned and re-combined.

North is up and east is to the left.

20160522_Mars_CombTarget_aligned-comb-IPmrs-TPadj-rot180.jpg processed from 20160522-Mars-0008.avi