Mars Imaging Gallery

Your images of Mars – if you'd like to see your images here please submit to web2010(at)astronomynow.com.

Above: Ian Sharp's images of Mars showing bright Olympus cloud and the north polar cap. More of Ian's images at: http://www.astro-sharp.com/mars2010.asp.

Above: Damian Peach's images showing Syrtis Major and dense clouds over Aeria, which extended over Syrtis. He also notes the Elysium orographic clouds. More images at http://www.damianpeach.com/.

Above: Bruce Kingsley's images. He says, "The seeing was reasonable, improving later in the session to very good indeed. I imaged over a five hour period and observing the steady brightening of Nix Olympica was fascinting. During this session I guess the temperature reached aproximately -5 degrees but the visual was easily the best I have seen Mars this apperition." More of Bruce's images can be seen here.

Left: Peter Edwards' image shows some division in the north polar cap and some high white cloud or mist on the western limb.

Above: David Cartlidge of Stoke-on-Trent made this Sketch of Mars. His notes: Clear cold night with light patchy cloud, becoming colder with frost forming. Seeing variable but good at this time (II-III). Major features well defined. Syrtis Major appearing long and thin, foreshortened near w limb. Mare Tyrrhenum and Mare Cimmerium stretching across southern hemisphere. Hesperia just visible as a lighter division between Tyrrhenum and Cimmerium. N polar cap very bright against the dark collar.

Andrew Foster of the Netherlands made this movie of Mars in one night from 21:45 to 01:00 on 26-27 January after reading our Mars special issue, using a Celestron CPC800 on a fork mount, with 2 x barlow and Celestron Neximage camera. He says, "I took image sequences of 1200 frames each at 15 minute intervals for 3 1/4 hours, until battery died in the cold. I processed each image sequence with Registax 5, saved as jpgs then aligned / centered with Photoshop CS3. It took ages to do all the processing, especially for a 7 second animation, but I'm really pleased with the result! You can see the North polar cap (bottom right on the image), with I think Mare Acidalium and Sinus Sabaeus above (to the south). Also you can see the effect of the altitude increasing over the night, as Mars clears the atmospheric murk and the image becomes sharper."