The relatively close passage of the planet Mars continues and I spent some time last night observing and photographing the red planet with my 12- 1/2 inch reflecting telescope.
Mars is distant and tiny…over 62 million miles away right now. That makes for a small target when we’re talking a world half the size of Earth.
Even though tiny, Mars shows us some of its famous surface features and that in itself is extraordinary. Mars is generally the only planet in our solar system on which we can see surface features using earth-based telescopes. Most other planets are shrouded in clouds, tiny Mercury is too close to the sun for anything more than a minimal view of its surface. Distant dwarf planet Pluto is simply too far away.
That leaves Mars as the only planet left open for us to inspect for actual surface features. We have an opportunity to check out it’s rather earth-like features each time the planet passes relatively close to us. That’s happening right now.
The neat thing about Martian surface features is they look incredibly earth-like….a fact that has given rise to theories about life on the red planet going back hundreds of years.
Looking at Mars last night, magnified hundreds of times, it’s easy to see how those early astronomers thought maybe someone or something on Mars was looking back.
Below are a couple of images I made last night. The shots were made a couple of hours apart and show the planet’s rotation as its surface features rotate from left to right. Mars even has an earth-like day…it spins once in a little over 24 hours.
One thing noticeable in the two images is that the none on the right is a little sharper. That’s because it was made later during the night when Mars was higher in the sky. Observing planets high overhead with a telescope means we are looking through a lesser thickness of Earth’s turbulent atmosphere…. so the view is generally clearer.
The small northern polar cap is visible in both images as well as white clouds along the right edge of Mars. The dark Martian surface feature named Syrtis Major is the most prominent feature on the planet in both views. Syrtis Major is a large area of higher ground that rises above the surrounding reddish Martian desert.
You can find Mars in the eastern evening sky right after dark. It appears as a reddish bright star that doesn’t twinkle as much the background stars.