Tiny Mars and large Venus 20/1/17

[mikeDnight]

First clear night for a week, so out I went to oggle the planet's in twighlight.

Venus was very nice and showed some subtle shading and bright areas. Mars however gave a great show. It's tiny 5.3 ish arc second disc immediately revealed some dark albedo markings around the centre of its disc at 170X, but the image scale was way too small for me to make sense of it. Increasing the power to 340X, the detail became observable, though the seeing wasn't too clever at times. I had no preconceived idea of what the central meridian was and at first thought what I was seeing was sinus Meridiani and Margaretifer sinus, but I was wrong! Once I'd completed the cleaned up sketch I checked the LCM and found the markings to be Syrtis Major lower centre, with Hellas centre left. The rest of the detail falls nicely into place once these two features are known! The view is through a prism diagonal! Not a bad catch in such a small scope and at just over 5 arc seconds diameter! 

Mike

 

[laudropb]

Very nice sketches Mike astonishing detail on Mars for such a small disk.

[Grotemobile]

Mars is very small @ the moment. U

have done well there.

[johnfosteruk]

Great job Mike. 

[mikeDnight]

Here's the original eyepiece drawing with a few details written on after I'd worked our the meridian of Mars.

Mike 

[John]

Super Mike, really super

I was observing these two targets with my LZOS 130 yesterday evening with similar results. Detail can still be teased from Mars with some care. Venus was looking splendid - it's at a lovely phase at the moment.

On Mars I concluded that similar regions to the ones that you observed earlier were presented at around 18:30 yesterday as well. They showed a clear set of dark markings traversing the central part of the disk.

 

[MarsG76]

Nice and neat sketches.