StarGazer’s Telescope – Last Dance With Mars

Have you ever wondered what it was like to look through a real telescope? Tired of being clouded out night after night and would be happy with a look through any telescope? After all the exciting news we’ve heard about Mars, I thought it might be fun to let you take a look through a small telescope and see what Mars really looks like – flaws and all.

Step right up here to the eyepiece and have a look! Remember this is just a small telescope, so what you see isn’t going to look like images taken with the Hubble – or still images that have been processed to bring out details. This is just pure and natural…

Mars is very low on the horizon right now and the skies are turbulent. This makes getting a very clear image of Mars difficult in any telescope. If you can at least see the dark notch that looks different from the rest of the planet then you’re spotting Sytris Major. Sure, it doesn’t look like the media likes to show it, but a long time ago in 1649, an astronomer named Christiaan Huygens was the very first person to resolve a surface feature on another planet. It probably looked very much like it does here!

I don’t care how many times I look at Mars, I still enjoy it’s red color. Yeah, I know Mars is red because it has such a thin atmosphere, which cannot hold the blue like the Earth’s atmosphere can. But Mars is also red because of all of the rusted iron dust surrounding the planet and all the rusted iron on the planet. Of course, I’m a firm believer that it’s better to burn out than it is to rust… But then I’m old, too.

Did you catch a twinge of blue around the edge? That’s another thing that fascinates me about Mars. Every time I see that, I know I’m seeing the carbon dioxide from the polar caps and that’s just too cool to me. And now your peek through the StarGazer’s Telescope has ended.

Move over, because it’s my turn.