Astroblog: Conjunction on Mars

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Conjunction on Mars

As I have mentioned before, on September 1 there is a conjunction beteen Jupiter and Venus. On September 30 is another conjuction, of Earth and Venus, but you have to be on Mars to see it. There is also a conjunction between Jupiter and Mercury, although this is low to the horizon, and you might not be able to see it for dust. There's a chance this could be imaged by the Mars Rovers. Spirit has already taken one shot of the Earth in the Martian sky. If you look closely at Earth on the image (as always, click to enlarge, it's the Martian Sky about 20 minutes after sunset), you can see the Moon next to it, whether Sprirt could pick up the Moon in an evening shot is unknown to me.

The image was generated in Celestia. As I've said before, I love Celestia. It can take you to other worlds and let you see what the skies look like from there. I've almost finished a Celestia script (yeah! right! Like all the others you've promised you say) to run through the days before and after the conjunctions, but I'm having troubles getting the camrea to return to the same lat long when you run the script twice or more.

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 11:37 pm

Comments:

Ian, would you like to hazard a guess as to what Spirit was looking at in this image? There are quite a few more taken by the panoramic camera on Spirit during Sol 585.

# posted by