{"id":3629,"date":"2020-12-21T11:15:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-21T00:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2020\/12\/21\/observations-from-the-mars-2020-opposition\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T15:48:49","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T05:48:49","slug":"observations-from-the-mars-2020-opposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2020\/12\/21\/observations-from-the-mars-2020-opposition\/","title":{"rendered":"Observations from the Mars 2020 Opposition"},"content":{"rendered":"

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These are some of the drawings that I made during the Mars 2020 opposition. I would go out to my back porch with my 6 inch Dobsonian Newtonian telescope. I would look closely at Mars, making mental note of what I was seeing. Then I would go to the shack and immediately draw what I’d seen. I would then look for relatively recent images of Mars made by people with more experience and better equipment, and I’d compare my drawings with their images — this enabled me to understand what I was seeing. <\/b>Also useful was the Mars Profiler<\/a> of Sky and Telescope magazine<\/b> — you just plug in the date and time and it displays the part of Mars that is facing us. <\/b><\/p>\n

I was especially pleased with the drawing and image above because I’d been reading a lot about the Hellas impact crater in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. (SCP should be SPC = Southern Polar Cap.) <\/b><\/div>\n
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I came to think of this as the “M of Mars.” I think it is just Mare Cimmerium, Mare Hesperia, and Mare Tyrrhenum. <\/b><\/div>\n
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bcastropics.com made this illustration of how Mars’s apparent size has changed<\/b><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These are some of the drawings that I made during the Mars 2020 opposition. I would go out to my back porch with my 6 inch Dobsonian Newtonian telescope. I would look closely at Mars, making mental note of what I was seeing. Then I would go to the shack and immediately draw what I’d … Continue reading “Observations from the Mars 2020 Opposition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3630,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,308,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-astronomy","category-mars","category-telescopes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3635,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629\/revisions\/3635"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}