Here is one of my best efforts to image this planet of our solar neighborhood. The procedure of capturing and processing the image data is quite complicated for anyone without experience, but here follows shortly a description: I used as imaging telescope the Celestron C8 (SCT) with focal reducer at f6.3 and the imaging camera (Phillips Toucam 740K) was steadily attached and recording in avi (640x480, 10 frames per second). The avi video file was then splitted into individual image files. The best of these files (1095 out of 1206) were aligned, optimized and stacked with Registax v3. Thus the signal to noise ratio was improved significantly. Furhter processing took place in Photoshop.
Some data about the planet:
Mass (kg) : 6.421e+23
Mass (Earth = 1) : 1.0745e-01
Equatorial radius (km) : 3,397.2
Equatorial radius (Earth = 1) : 5.3264e-01
Mean density (gm/cm^3) : 3.94
Mean distance from the Sun (km) : 227,940,000
Mean distance from the Sun (Earth = 1) : 1.5237
Rotational period (hours) : 24.6229
Rotational period (days) : 1.025957
Orbital period (days) : 686.98
Mean orbital velocity (km/sec) : 24.13
Orbital eccentricity : 0.0934
Tilt of axis (degrees) : 25.19
Orbital inclination (degrees) : 1.85
Equatorial surface gravity (m/sec^2) : 3.72
Equatorial escape velocity (km/sec) : 5.02
Visual geometric albedo : 0.15
Magnitude (Vo) : -2.01
Minimum surface temperature : -140 Celsius
Mean surface temperature : -63 Celsius
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