Mars at Opposition
Wednesday, August 27, Mars reached opposition, which means that the Sun, Earth and Mars roughly lie along a straight line. Mars subtended 25 arc seconds in the sky at this time. Note the south polar ice cap (water and carbon dioxide ice) visible in the picture.
Professor Bill Putikka and postdoc Richard Hennig took this image north of Columbus with a Nikon digital camera attached to a 10 inch Meade LX-200 telescope. "Registax" software combined forty frames, each exposed for 1/30 second. Additional processing using ACDsee involved applying an unsharp mask and Gaussian blur. More pictures can be seen at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~rhennig. Contact Prof. Putikka at putikka@mps.ohio-state.edu or Dr. Hennig at rhennig@mps.ohio-state.edu for more information.
