Mars sketch

[nytecam]

Mars is currently at opposition [closest to Earth] eg the reddish bright star high and due south at midnight.

Mars has always be my favourite planet as its the only one that you can see surface detail with a small telescope - all the other planets except Mercury are completely cloud covered!

It's many years since I've observed Mars closely but last night, to my surprise, through my little Meade ETX-70 x80 eyepiece I clearly saw a white polar cap and dark surrounding collar and shading extending southwards with lightish area adjacent that I've tried to recreate in sketch below - hope it's of interest.



If you've got a scope give Mars a go in the next month - it then starts to shrink in size as it pull away from earth

[nytecam]

Here's a sequence taken with a digital pocket cam in video mode handheld to eyepiece of my Celestron C-8 SCT perked on a table on the patio The are the sharpest frames from ~60sec of video grossing 1800 frames. 90% of video is completely blurred due to camera shake but a worthwhile exercise

I've used a RGB channel split for better contrast. If you use your imagination you can see some surface features common to others in the set - noticeably the north polar [ice] cap with darkish collar and shading to the left edge [limb] eg Syrtis Major the most prominent dark feature on Mars. The light spot at the bottom may be the south polar hood and other shading may be identified when I've time

In case you're wondering why they're not better it maybe because Mars was ~60,000,000 miles away and as good as it gets this time around!

[Vectisbirder]

That's a really good sketch and represents the view we usually get of Mars.