Is Stellarium's view of Mars accurate?

[Ags]

I know Stellarium is not very accurate with the position of the Great Red Spot (because it is a storm and it moves about) but is it accurate with the solid rock features of Mars' surface?

I made a sketch of Mars last night and Stellarium confirms the features I recorded... it would be nice to know it is not just some incredible coincidence! :-)

[Ags]

Meep?

[Ags]

Well, I have done more sketches and they also match the view in Stallarium, so I am leaning towards Stellarium giving accurate Mars views.

I am using the touch pad on my laptop, no mouse, so I have no mouse wheel zooming. My workaround is to use the ocular plugin with a 0.3mm EP for my 4SE - finally I get a nice golf-ball sized planet :-) Anyone know where I can buy a x20 barlow for my 6mm EP :-)

[NGC1337]

I would say that it's fairly accurate. You can see the texture that Stellarium uses for Mars in Program Files/Stellarium/textures/mars.png. I also see that Stellarium shows the rotation of Mars seemingly accurately. As you said, the martian surface is fixed, more-so than Jupiter's anyways. As long as the developers have the Mars texture rotated on the sphere correctly, and they have the rotation rate correct, it should be true to life.

I suppose large dust storms may change the view a bit? And I believe the polar ice caps grow and shrink depending on the season (by how much I don't know), which won't be reflected in Stellarium.

[StarlightKnight]

For fixed features you could also check with winjupos as it has details for all of the planets.

WinJUPOS / Database for object positions on planets and the Sun

Don

[12dstring]

The short answer is.. yes.

As it happens I'm currently writing a Mars and Jupiter view simulator for my website.

The problem with Jupiter is that we're looking at clouds, and clouds move. In particular the Great Red Spot is currently moving around at around 8 degrees a year, but sometimes goes backwards.

In contrast Mars is nice rocky body, the main features don't change (as mentioned there are dust storms which obscure features, and the ice caps shrink and grow), but the actual position of the surface features are simple to calculate.

Here's a comparison:

Left is an image taken last Sunday, centre is the one I'm working on, and the right is Stellarium.