The Red Planet

By John W.  Reed

As a teenager I remember reading Robert Heinlein's Red Planet.  It was a story about two teenagers growing up on a future Mars that was very different than the one we know today.  Heinlein wrote that book in 1949, long before the Viking Lander, before the Pioneer fly-by, even before the tell-tale beep of Sputnik.  The Mars of those days was largely based on visual observations, including Percival Lowell's descriptions of a dying desert planet criss-crossed by water carrying canals.  In fact two of the characters ice skate on one of those canals.  Anyway, the book has always left a permanent impression on me that makes my eye wander up to that red-orange beacon whenever it makes its appearance in the night sky.

On January 16th I rolled my telescope out into my driveway to enjoy the first clear night in several weeks.  It was very clear, the stars were bright crystals of light in a dark winter sky.  It was about 40', cool but not cold.  Mars was already high in the sky, situated in Gemini, the twins.  It formed a sort of triangle with the two stars Castor and Pollux.  Its color to the unaided eye was a light orange akin to a hot coal upon which one blows, making it hotter and brighter.  The deep sky could wait as I swung my 10" newtonian toward this fiery beacon.

At first I used my 25mm eyepiece.  My telescope's focal length is 60" so this produces a magnification of 60x.  Mars' apparent diameter at that time was only 15 arcseconds, not much larger than the disk of Saturn without the rings!   At that magnification it was a small copper BB in the center of my field of view.  However the disk's edge seemed very sharp and well defined.  The seeing seemed to be very good.  I inserted the 2x barlow ahead of the 25mm.  This made the image double in size.  At 120x I still couldn't really see any detail about the surface, but the disc seemed to be sharp as ever!   Good seeing, I thought Usually the wintertime is not known for it's atmospheric seeing.

I plugged my 12.5 mm into the barlow thinking that 240x would really be too much.  Well, the edge was still pretty sharp and I could now clearly see a polar cap and a hint of some other markings on the planet itself!   Now we were getting somewhere!   If only I could make it even larger.  Mars is so small that even 240x is not really enough to enlarge the disk for optimum viewing.  At this power it nearly zoomed across my field of view.  I don't have a clock drive, even though my telescope does have a homemade equatorial mount.  Every bump to the tube made the image dance and jiggle for many seconds.  I had to place the orb far outside the field of view so that when it drifted across the vibrations had time to stop.  I laughed and wondered if I could double the magnification again.

I have a 6mm orthoscopic I could plug into the barlow, produc-ing a whopping 480x!   I have never done this as the seeing usually never permits such magnification.  How-ever, I thought I might give it a try just to see what would happen.  In the past I have had several neo-phytes ask what magnification my 'scope is rated.  Rather than try to explain that it's not magnification, but rather aperture that is the important number, I simply state that I almost never use more than 120x.  This leaves the questioner only partly placated, but he probably doesn't want a full dissertation on power per inch limits etc., so we leave it at that.  Well I guess now I can say 480x and make them happier!   That is 48x per inch which is usually said to be pushing the limit in most books.

With the 6mm in place I gazed into an amazing sight.  What usually should have been a hopeless blur was still a respectable disk with well defined edges.  There was, of course, some degradation of the image, hut it was so large and spread out I really could begin to see more detail.  Amazing!   The planet's overall color was that of a slightly tarnished penny.  This penny's lower edge was tipped with an oval of eggshell colored material sur-rounded by a slightly darker fringe.  The lower half of the disk was featureless, but the upper half had some interesting markings demand-ing further scrutiny.

These markings I saw were slightly darker than the planet itself, about the color of a faint pencil smudge.  They seemed to be low contrast, fading in and out with the seeing.  My procedure now was to glean as much as I could while the planet sped across the field of view.  If I assume my eyepiece has a 50 degree apparent field of view, then at 480x Mars crossed this field in only 25 seconds.  I would push the telescope far ahead of where the planet was, so it took about a half a minute for the martian disk to appear at the edge of the eyepiece's field of view.  If I tried to rush this so I would not have to wait as long, the planet would still be doing lazy loops and ovals all the way across and I would see nothing.  In spite of these complications I managed to catch perfect moments of seeing.  I began to make a sketch showing these dark areas and the polar cap.  The more I looked the more I refined my sketch until I felt it was right and there was no more information to be included.

During one of the last pas-sages of the planet through my telescope, I glimpsed a moment where it seemed that the air became rock still!   I still wonder if I will ever see anything like it again.  Maybe if I observed planets more often I wouldn't be so impressed, but then again maybe I should.  For an instant it was as if a veil lifted away revealing the true Mars.  It only lasted for a fraction of a second, but it was long enough.  I immediately confirmed my sketch to be accurate, but now I could see even more detail.  The dark markings had smeary striations, mottled dark patches and small areas of lighter material.  It was like flying over a city at night You can see the glow of the lights through the clouds below and get some idea of the extent of the city, but when an opening in the cloud deck passes by, suddenly you are seeing houses and streets.  Well I don't believe Mars has houses and streets, but I was certainly seeing some very fine surface features.  Then almost before I could draw a breath it was gone and the seeing got much worse.

I ran into the house and obtained my November Sky and Telescope which has a map on page on page 545 showing the Martian features visible from an amateur telescope.  According to the en-closed table the central meridian should have been 250 degrees which would mean what I was seeing was Syrtis Major, Tyrrhenum Mare, and Cimmerium Mare.  The Empty area on the northern hemisphere was the Elysium.  My sketch matched perfectly.  I just wish I would have had time to sketch those even finer details.

So even though we now know Mars no longer has deteriorating Martian cities, ice filled canals and strange flora and fauna, it is still an interesting world upon which to gaze.  Be sure to look quick as its fast slipping away, after February it will be even smaller and more distant.  Try viewing mars yourself and you may find that you grok it more than you think!