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It is not difficult to see surface features on Mars at all...if you consider the other planets (all under optimal conditions). Jupiter: easy, but the level of detail varies enormously; Saturn: I'd say it is about the same ranking as Mars, although you could start to quibble over what the word "features" means. As to the rest... Mercury? I don't think so. Venus? Do phases count as surface features? Probably not. Uranus, Neptune and of course the asteroids are out of the question. In fact when it comes to Mars I think it's astonishing we can see anything at all on that tiny world.
I'd like to endorse the comments made earlier by Dave about the reasons for bothering to look at Mars or anything else in the night sky. John Dobson years ago took it to an extreme when he commented at a public forum in Sydney that astrophotographers have some kind of disease: there are far better photos available from HST and so on that are far superior to anything they could produce (he said, not me!). But he had a point: people want to see things for themselves, otherwise tourism would be a thing of the past now the internet is here.
About 15 years ago I was running an evening Astronomy course and the members of the group wanted to see Uranus through my 8" Dob. I told them they'd see little more than a small dot, but that wasn't the point. They wanted to be able to say they'd seen it with their own eyes and it gave me a thrill to be able to show them. It's a very human, very valid perspective (no pun intended). I am absolutely hooked on exploring the Moon telescopically and buy books (such as Charles Wood's for example) to help me do so. I do not simply sit in a chair and look at photos and I doubt many of you do either. While I don't share Deep Sky observers' interest, I do appreciate their motives and applaud all those sketches louder than the technological triumph of electronic images (although they're extraordinary too!).
Geoff Mc
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