Thursday, February 16, 2012

Focusing More on Mars

Last night was annoyingly wet, condensation all over my scope and the Telerad was too blurry to be useful. But through this the seeing was really very good. Mars was shrouded in a huge halo from all the condensation, but the planet in the middle of that was nicely defined. I did 3 sketches, the second because I thought I had overworked the first, the third was to test myself - make sure my results were all pretty similar. That worked out so I went inside to make the final sketch from those while it was all very fresh in my head. I was using the same paper as two days prior when I also did a drawing of Mars. To protect that from smudging I covered it, when I pulled the smudge-guard away I noticed how similar the two pictures looked. Mars should have been rotationally in nearly the same position as Monday Iit's day is only a little more than a half hour longer), I thought what I'd just done looked like a more detailed version of the previous one. Almost like the same image but the first a bit over-exposed. I really thought that after drawing Jupiter I'd be bored by Mars, but it turns out I like it more.
Steve Gale

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