Mars close to Earth, what kind of telescope?

Criosdaidhlaoch · 08-06-2003, 10:23 PM

Hey I'm sure you all have heard about mars being so close to the earth this month. So what I'm wondering is what kind of telescope would be cool for seeing it? What power would I have to have? I know more than 100+. What kind? About how much would one of these run?

saturnd00d · 08-06-2003, 10:27 PM

I could be wrong but I got an email at work that Mars will be so close to earth this month that we will be able to see it with the naked eye. It'll be almost as large as the moon.

Vipe · 08-06-2003, 10:39 PM

Sweet. If not, I'll get my rifle scope out

Cxtra_ION · 08-06-2003, 10:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by saturnd00d

I could be wrong but I got an email at work that Mars will be so close to earth this month that we will be able to see it with the naked eye. It'll be almost as large as the moon.

WTF large as the moon?? that seems a bit too close..lol

Nasa should go ahead and try and land on it while its there..

Syko10-96 · 08-06-2003, 10:42 PM

if it looked that big, it would be a lot closer than 34.65 million miles...

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/0...eut/index.html

for observation tips, you may want to checkout Sky and Telescope's website

Dedikted · 08-06-2003, 11:00 PM

Thats pretty cool. I hope I remember to go out and look at it.

Syko10-96 · 08-06-2003, 11:07 PM

just to further dispute that email...

<geek>
Mars would appear to be about the same size as the moon from 1.1 million miles away from earth...that's quite a bit less than 34.65...

for a visual aid:

http://www.shadoweaver.net/images/mars_and_moon.gif

The red dot is Mars and the gray circle is the Moon... that's roughly how the sizes should match up...

just food for thought...felt like I had to do something semi productive today...

</geek>

SteveO · 08-06-2003, 11:31 PM

Well I have an 8inch Dobsonian Newtonian Reflector, and with my highest power, mars will fill my view.

Mars has always been visible with the naked eye. In fact, its visible right now. it just looks like a little orange dot tho with the naked eye

because the object in question is within the solar system and is pretty damn big, you could use any scope. department store crap to a observatory quality telescope and it'll look decent. Binoculars would be great for this too.

of course the more power you have, the bigger it'll look. I dont know the multiplying factor that would be good...I'm not going to ramble on about that because its different for different scopes. if you could get something thats even like 40x or more, it'll be small but you'll see detail... you could go 1000x and it'll be huge, but it'll just look like a fuzzy red ball unless you have a 16 inch wide scope!

Also, if you have access to a red color filter for your eyepiece, that will bring out the details on the martian surface aswell.

I love astronomy. if anyone else out there is remotely interested in space, astronomy, astrophysics etc, check out www.space.com , www.rednova.com , theres another great one I'm forgetting right now but i'll post later. EDIT: its www.physlink.com

Also a reality check... Mars will be closer than it has ever been in the past 70000 years or whatever... if you think about it however, this is only statistically significant, since next time around it may be 1/2 million miles farther away... that really makes no difference when we're looking at it from earth with our amateur telescopes. so really, going out today and looking at mars will look nearly exactly the same as when you look at it on August 27th.

This also happened a couple years ago with Jupiter... hyped up on CNN and what not and it looked no different than it ever had. Not to say that this August 27th wont be a great day to see Mars, I'm just pointing out the fact that it's not going to look a whole lot different!

Ok I'm taking my geek glasses off now. go out and enjoy the night sky!

Criosdaidhlaoch · 08-06-2003, 11:47 PM

Thats all good info thanks guys. I just thought it would be kind of neat to make a big deal of it since it rarely happens.

Again thanks for all the quick replies!