开云体育

Best night this season for Mars. I will have a longer list of carbon stars coming but wanted to comment on Mars tonight. The scope took 40 minutes to settle out temperature wise but once it did, wow. At 187 using the 4mm Zeiss there were lots of albedo features.? Easy. The pole, Utopia, Hellas Basin, Syrtis Major on the limb and Mare Serpentis all showed well.

?I upped the power to 239x using the Takahashi TOE 3.3mm. That made the image bigger and it didn't deteriorate much. Soooo. I went to the 2.4mm Vixen. Well that was a lot bigger pushing 100x per inch. There was a bit of degradation but if you waited for that magic second............ oh my goodness. What was a generalized dark band resolved itself into an irregular border with a small peninsula. This lasted only for a second but wow what a view at 359X. Most of the time it was a bit of wavers but you just had to wait for the miracle moment to occur. Overall about two hours of just Mars observing. The best overall view was with the 3.3 Takahashi.