As almost everyone is certain to know by now, Mars will make its closest
approach to the Earth in 60,000 years on the 27th (although it's important not to
exaggerate too much the difference in closest approaches that occur every 2.5
years or so).

Nonetheless, Mars will be so bright this time, if you can find a place dark
enough, Mars will cast a shadow on the ground, just like the Moon does, but
obvioiusly dimmer.

I belong to the local amateur astronomy group here, the Astronomical Society
of Las Cruces (New Mexico). These people have been taking and sharing a fair
number of really nice photographs from their backyard observatories. Thirty to
forty years ago, these would have been among the best professional photographs
available. I've put up a number of them on one of our auxiliary webservers:

      http://67.41.4.238/mars20030628.jpg
      http://67.41.4.238/mars20030723.jpg
      http://67.41.4.238/mars20030803.jpg
      http://67.41.4.238/mars20030807.jpg
      http://67.41.4.238/mars20030820.jpg

I've unfortunately lost track of who took which photographs or I would added
proper attribution to the images.

These images are not the result of single snapshots, but rather are the
"stacked" averages of a number of images taken by webcams attached to the optical
outputs of their telescopes.

As one of the members, Rich Rankin, wrote about the August 20th image he took
yesterday:

======================================

Mars looked so beautiful in the clearing sky last night as we left
Dave's new home that I just had to try another imaging session.

I took Steve's advice and reduced the frames per second to 8 (which
is maximum quality for 640 x 480 on my system).  I also remembered to
remove the Hartman mask this time.  Images captured at 2:22 am.  Sky
was OK for seeing (7/10?).  Attached image is a stack of 38
software-selected frames (out of 168).  Laplacian Pyramid sharpening
done in Keith's Image Stacker.  Color saturation, hue, brightness and
levels adjusted in Photoshop.  Central meridian is about 164 degrees.
Up is up.

=======================================

You can make of that description what you will. Under any circumstance,
there's no denying the quality of the images that they're getting.

Wirt Atmar

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *