This is really off-topic, but as you may have noticed, Mars is coming in for 
its second closest approach in 60,000 years now. It's the bright red planet in 
the eastern sky each night now, exceptionally well visible even in city 
lights after 9PM, almost directly overhead by midnight.

As I've mentioned before, I belong to a local astronomy group and one of the 
members, Dave Dockery, took this exceptional photograph just a few nights ago 
using a digital SLR camera, using his own equipment in his backyard:

     http://homepage.ntlworld.com/damian.peach/2005_11_06rgb_DAP.jpg

You can compare the quality of Dave's photograph to that taken by the 
billion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope during Mars' last closest approach:

     http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/mars/mars-hubble-082603-browse.jpg

The two photographs are of the same hemisphere of Mars (more or less), 
although one is upside down in regards to the other. In Dave's image, the large pale 
landmass on the bottom half of the photograph is Arabia Terra, with the 
crater Cassini exceptionally bright for some reason. Arabia Terra lies in the upper 
half of the Hubble image, with the crater Cassini made invisible by the 
lighting angle.

I consider the quality of Dave's photograph to be quite extraordinary, not 
only because of the dollar difference, but because the Hubble has the added 
advantage of not having to look through the murk and mud of the Earth's atmosphere.

At the same time that Mars is rising in east, Venus, which is nearing its 
maxium extension and thus exceptionally bright, is setting in west. Last night 
the Moon lay exactly halfway between the planets and made it very easy to trace 
out the plane of the ecliptic (the line on which eclipses occur). All of the 
planets and the Moon (more or less) lie along this plane.

Each night the Moon moves 1/27th through the sky, thus tonight the Moon will 
be closer to Mars than Venus, but you should still be able to quite easily 
imagine the plane of the ecliptic. It's exactly the same path that the Sun takes 
across the sky during the daytime.

Wirt Atmar

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