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RASC - St. John's Centre |
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| Image of Mars
taken from St. John's, Newfoundland. Photographed by Tim Caruk - March 1, 2012 |
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Mars is now at it's closest to Earth and is directly opposite the Sun in it's orbit as viewed from Earth. At only half the diameter of Earth Mar's rusty red iron oxide surface, white water ice polar caps, thin atmosphere and occasional cloud are visible in small telescopes. I took this image of Mars on March 1, 2012 through a C9.25 telescope. Mars showed a large amount of detail on a night of extraordinary seeing conditions. Its apparent diameter is only 13.9 arc seconds or about 1/130 the diameter of the moon at it's farthest distance. Click on image for full original photo. |