Mars 25/7/18

[mikeDnight]

A truly awful night as far as seeing conditions were concerned. The planet looked like it was on fire as it sped across the field of view; however, fractionally defocusing the image by moving the focuser inward eased the problem of turbulent air. With the image now just slightly out of focus the albedo features began to reveal themselves. 

The attached eyepiece sketch shows the features on show as they appeared through the little refractor. I began by plotting the brighter areas and then as the darker features moved in and out of focus I added them in their relative positions. I had my diagonal at an angle for comfort, hence the odd orientation of the drawing.

Below is a cleaned up version

And here is a flipped image showing classical orientation. 

[Knighty2112]

Great work Mike. Excellent sketches as usual.   I was hoping to observe Mars last night, but alas clouds scuppered that idea totally. 

[Saganite]

Fine sketches Mike that show me what I thought I could see !

A great ball of fire is exactly how I recently described Mars, but I had not thought of slightly  defocusing.

Many thanks. 

[Littleguy80]

Brilliant, Mike. I was picking up the one darker region last but not to that level of detail. Neat trick with the defocusing, will try that next time!

[domstar]

Great work. Just shows what the trained eye (and hand) can do with a lot of patience.

[Peter Drew]

Good tip regarding slight defocusing. I've noticed this effect on the other planets when the seeing is turbulent.

[Dragon_Astro]

Some great sketches there

I was able to spend a short time on Mars last night too, my view of the darker areas matches yours.

[chiltonstar]

Nice work. Strangely, the seeing here was good and some albedo features were visible at low mag (Mak 180, x130), particularly rocking the scope slightly which I often find shows more detail. I am sure that the view is slightly clearer than it was a week ago.

Chris

[Chris]

Tenacious effort Mike  Mars was behind the tall fence for me, but just managed a look at the Moon and Saturn with the Tak60 through glare and thin cloud. No turbulence mind, not sure if 60mm of aperture does turbulence but it might be the mag, Saturn was as steady as anything at 105x with the Vixen 3.4mm HR.

[Stu]

Great stuff Mike. I've no idea how you do that, i was out at the same time, same scope, same mag, binoviewers and whilst l could see some dark areas, there is no way I could pull that amount of detail out. I'll try the refocusing trick next time out!

[mikeDnight]

3 hours ago, Littleguy80 said:

Brilliant, Mike. I was picking up the one darker region last but not to that level of detail. Neat trick with the defocusing, will try that next time!

Hi Neil,

Last night the turbulence dominated everything, even the moon and Saturn, which were both much higher than Mars at the time of observation. Cassini division, which is almost always an easy target, was lost last night in a boiling blur. Defocusing the view of mars by only a fraction removed much of the violent boiling while still giving me a reasonably sharp limb. Its always worth a try with Mars, though I doubt it would work quite so well with the more complex detail seen on Jupiter. I hope you get an opportunity to try it out soon! 

[BRADLEY 1953]

 Hi  Mike, once again a great sketch of the red planet, it looks far more accurate than my earlier effort.  Best wishes  Chris. 

[mikeDnight]

11 hours ago, BRADLEY 1953 said:

 Hi  Mike, once again a great sketch of the red planet, it looks far more accurate than my earlier effort.  Best wishes  Chris. 

Thankyou Chris, though I think you do yourself an injustice as your observing and sketching ability is some of the best I've seen. As for Mars, I've observed it obsessively over the last 17 years or so, and have become so familiar with its features under various conditions that it usually doesn't take me long to know what I'm looking at. With the observation above, once I'd outlined the brighter regions I started to look for subtle differences in shading around those bright areas. In less than a minute I detected the very distinctive narrow tail of Margaretifer trailing northward towards Acidalia. After that it was just a case of observing to see how much more detail I could squeeze from that turbulent disc. It's a shame the seeing was so bad, as I know there's so much more to see of that region while the planet is at 24" arc, yet on this occasion it wasn't being revealed.

[Pete Presland]

Lovely sketch, nice to see some details return. 

[mariosi]

Very nice observation and sketch of Mars. 

Marios