[Chaos-l] Get Out And See Mars!

[Robert Nielsen]

Everyone,

I was out last Friday as well as Jorge and Jon ... but I went to Medoc 
Mountain State Park, where I met Bruno Pancorbo, Mark South, and Allen 
Davis.   Since Greg Fishel had backed off his forecast that clouds would 
be showing up at 3 AM, I brought my big scope (referred to by my wife as 
"the mistress") and planned to stay the whole night.  I'm glad I brought 
the bigger scope, because one of the highlights of the night was Mars!   
That scope does pretty well on the planets.

I guess our view of Mars was better than Jon's and Jorge's for a few 
reasons.  First, we didn't have a huge heat sink (Jordan Lake) to the 
south of us.   Medoc does have a low light dome to the south, probably 
caused by Rocky Mount, but there is not really any water close by.   
Also, we started looking at Mars after Mark arrived, a little bit before 
midnight.   At that point, Mars was very, very high in the sky - around 
70 degrees in altitude.

In any case, the seeing right around where Mars was actually was pretty 
good.   Allen and I could push the magnification up beyond 300x.  In 
fact, I put the 5mm Nagler in my scope, and while the view wasn't 
perfect, it was usable.   But I settled in and used the 9mm eyepiece, 
which gave a magnification of 396X.   You could *easily* see the polar 
ice cap that is prominent on the planet now (you can see it with even a 
very small scope or binoculars ... it is much larger than the last time 
I really looked at Mars) because there is a dark area that borders it.   
And Friday night, there was a darker area on the other pole of the 
planet (the south pole?) with portions that poked up into the middle of 
the planet along one of its limbs.   Even better, there were some 
features you could see in the center of the planet and some structure to 
some of the dark areas.

What was amazing was the view when Mark let us borrow his "Mars 
filter".    Allen mentioned that he wasn't much of a fan of using 
colored filters to look at planets.   I tend to agree ... I know that 
people say they enhance certain characteristics of the view ... but I've 
always thought that I could see those features without a filter, and it 
looked more natural.   Well, the filter Mark had definitely changed my 
mind.  Without a doubt, it enhanced both the canali and the polar ice 
caps and seemed to bring out more detail.  In fact, it brought out 
enough detail that we could see the structure in the southern darker 
area and I could see the darker "spots" around Elysium Mons.   This 
filter really did seem to work and the pinkish hue that it cast on the 
planet was not objectionable at all.   Thanks again, Mark, for letting 
us borrow it!

For more information about the filter, go to: 
http://www.astromart.com/articles/article.asp?article_id=597.

And to see what I think is the view we saw last Friday night, go to 
http://www.marsbase.net/m/mars-from-earth.php with a Java-enabled 
browser and enter the date 2010 1 16 and the time 4 15 (this is UTC, so 
it is 5 hours ahead of our local time).   I think that is pretty close 
to what we saw (well, not as detailed, obviously) but the northern ice 
cap was much, much larger.   Consider it to have covered most of the 
darker area at the top of the map.

And to see what the features are named on Mars, go to 
http://www.marsbase.net/m/mars-map.php.

I will try to write up more of the observing session on my blog in the 
next week.   But I really enjoyed the time last Friday night ... I 
needed a good, all-nighter under the stars ... with a fire close by to 
warm me up ...

Robert