When I was up early yesterday morning
imaging Mars, I also took the chance to take a look through an eyepiece at the more orange than red planet.
The seeing was quite steady, so I pushed the mag up to 416x by using a 9mm eyepiece in combination with my 3x barlow. Even at this magnification, I could make out quite a bit of surface detail very similar looking to my image, just not as sharp. The poor quality eyepiece and barlow meant the image wasn't sharp, and didn't have well defined edges, but it was still the best eyepiece view I've ever had of Mars (I wasn't into astronomy during the 2003 opposition).
Using the 9mm eyepiece alone (@138x), Mars was simply too bright to make out any detail or albedo features. It definitely could've used a ND or other colour filter to dim it down a bit. But instead I just increased the magnification.
I think that around 300x probably would've given the best view given the seeing conditions.. I'm really looking forward to the next few months as Mars gets bigger..
On a night of good seeing it's just going to be a brilliant view.
