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Dust on Mars - Fog on Earth
That's right, folks. Sydney has just settled into a fog halfway through my observation tonight.
Over the past week I have done guerilla observations of Mars, basically coming home from working a night shift. I take the scope out of the garage, and my eyepieces and sketch my way through a half hour observation, usually from about 0545-0615 local time. I put things away as dawn begins to lighten the eastern sky and crawl into bed.
It's so quick and time so short that I don't even connect up the GoTo mount to power but just physically push the scope so that the planet gets to pass across my eyepiece vision repeatedly.
The south polar cap has returned but other detail remains elusive. I carefully mark out pencil smudges to record it on paper. There might still be a dust haze blanket, as I saw an aggregate of faint detail suspiciously like Syrtis Major and surrounds. W23A and W25 filters are needed to bring out max contrast.
Tonight I have the luxury of consulting MarsPreviewer to find out which face I'll be trying to see.
My Philips ToUCamPro is out of commission, since OS software upgrades rendered it incompatible with my laptop (thank you, Philips, the never-buy-again-brand and thank you Bill Gates) so it's back to 19th century methods of recording observations.
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