Astroblog: Mars and the Pleiades

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Mars and the Pleiades

This morning I got up in the wee hours before astronomical twilight to try and image Mars. After some frustration, until I discovered I had knocked the finderscope out of alignment (especially since my south-pole aligned scope required me to govel in the dirt to see Mars through the finderscope), I finally got Mars in the camrea filed of view and took some shots, the best of which you can see above. As you can see "best" is a misnomer. Seeing was terrible. It was bloody cold but the turbulence was terrible, the limiting magnitude was pretty low too. Probably because the sky was full of failed mist, which insisted on condensing on the telescope and me.

Anyway, my first Mars shot. I have put an image from the JPL Solar System Simulator site for comparison. You can clearly see the dark markings in my awful image correspond to those from the expected face of Mars (Mare Siremun I think). I was surprised to not see a polar cap. When I observed Mars at similar stages before opposition in 2001 and 2003 I could clearly see a polar cap.

The two dots down below are my first shots of the Pleiades. The Pleiades are too big to image with my camera, but it means I can go after more compact obects of similar brightness.