Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Friday, January 13th.  The sun will rise at 8:17.  It’ll be up for 9 hours and 8 minutes, setting at 5:25.   The moon, 3 days before last quarter, will rise at 10:52 this evening.

This evening the moon will pass below the planet Mars after the moon rises near 11 p.m.  Mars is rather distant now, and it won’t be really near in its next close approach to us on March 5th when it will be slightly under 63 million miles away.  In telescopes Mars is and will remain a tiny disk with a hint of a white polar cap on one end.  Photographers with large telescopes and CCD cameras can  capture Mars even better and show some surface detail.  We have even closer views of Mars.  Of course there is an operating rover called Opportunity still active on the planet and the Curiosity rover on its way plus three orbiting satellites, two US and one European.   The satellites will be cruising overhead as Curiosity lands August 5th.

* Times, as always are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of  Michigan.

Addendum

Mars on the morning of January 9, 2012. By Scott Anttila

Here’s Scott Anttila’a image of Mars from Monday morning, the 9th. Note Mar’s gibbous phase. Mars will become full when it’s at opposition from the sun March 3rd. It is only 9.7 seconds of arc in diameter. Also note, beside the northern polar cap that’s quite obvious, there is a hazy patch near the right edge of Mars. It is what telescopic astronomers of a hundred years ago called Nix Olympica, the Snows of Olympus. When the Mariner 9 spacecraft reached Mars in 1971 it found that there was a real mountain there. So the feature was renamed Olympus Mons or Mount Olympus. The white haze isn’t snow but water ice clouds that condense over the mountain peak. Mount Olympus is 14 miles high, three times taller than Mt Everest. The closest earth analog to it is the volcanic peak Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii. Actually you’d have to throw in the entire island of Hawaii itself from the sea floor on up.