Sunday, September 9, 2018

The Incredible Shrinking Mars!

If you haven't had a chance to take a peek at Mars through a telescope yet, you'd better hurry!  Mars is shrinking into nothingness.

Shrinking?  Well, not really.  But from our perspective on Earth, Mars is now noticeably smaller than as it appeared in July when it was at opposition.

Soon, Mars will be just a little tiny red dot in the sky.  It'll be too small to see any features and all of the fun I've had with Mars will be over.

  😭

This image is a composite of two of my Mars captures.  Each Mars in this composite was captured from my backyard at the same magnification with my usual equipment and processed in the usual way.  No additional zooming or scaling was applied.

I merely copied and pasted an image of Mars from July 27th into a file with an image of Mars from last weekend, September 3rd's image, to be specific. And then I added some expository text and graphics.

Look! Mars is shrinking!

Mars's Apparent Size, Now Versus Opposition 

Over the next several months, I'll sadly be watching as Mars continues to get further away from us, knowing that it'll be another two years and fifty days until Mars' next opposition.

Next week? Assuming the sky isn't pouring buckets of rain down on us as it is now, more (smaller) Mars.

4 comments:

  1. This puts Mars into perspective. 😬. Liking the new Mars Orbiter photos too... definitely hoping we can see more Kepler data... Mars may be shrinking, but my interest is spiking!

    ReplyDelete
  2. This Viking Orbiter image made my jaw drop recently: Valles Marineris: The Grand Canyon of Mars

    With all of the data I've captured, Mars has also been shrinking the available storage space on my workstation . . . need to add more storage to my upgrade list.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah, it looks like hurricane Florence is going to smother the East Coast. I'm not too optimistic about clear skies for this coming weekend. But ya never know!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I guess I could take the mirror out and make use of the free distilled water falling from the sky and give the mirror a bath!

      Delete

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