Red Planet in the Morning

In two months time, on August 27, Mars will be closer to Earth than in any time in the past 59,619 years. Every two years, Mars is favorably placed for observing, being on the same side of the Sun as we are, and this time around we are approaching a record-setting opposition of Mars. Now is the time to start watching in a telescope the lead-up to this event, as the planet, rising in the early morning, is already 60% of its maximum apparent size in the sky.

Getting up at 4 in the morning is not something I am wont to do, but for some reason I woke up at that time, so I got up, poked my nose outside to check the sky and wind conditions, and thought why not? I hauled the 7” reflector outside to get it cooling to ambient temperature, went back for a little bit of a doze, threw some clothes on, and started observing.

Telescopic observing is good exercise in the discipline of learning to see. Anybody expecting magazine-quality images in the eyepiece will be disappointed; visual details are instead subtle and take much patience to tease out. In the case of viewing planets, one is constantly battling atmospheric flickering (known as “poor seeing”), and one’s impression of surface detail gets built up over many tens of minutes of observing.

The conditions were good this morning—it was cool and the air was pretty still. I think such conditions are typical in the summer here, which bodes well for Mars-watching in the next couple of months. It’s getting up at that hour that’s the challenge. Above is a rendering based on a sketch I did at the eyepiece. The South Polar Cap was quite evident, as was a darkish area in the Southern Hemisphere.

Some critters were up too and kept me company. A coyote howled once at the passage of a freight train, and a western kingbird sung for a bit while it was still quite dark.