Mars (Bruce Rohrlach)

Contains: Solar system body or event

Mars

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Mars

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Mars - 2 days out from the 13th October 2020 opposition.

Now is the best time to observe Mars - as both Mars and Earth are on the same side of the sun, and so are closest to each other. At local midnight, Mars is now at it's highest point in the night sky and its closest to Earth.

Over the next 13 months, Earth (which is on the inside track of the orbit around the sun) will race ahead and leave the red planet further in its wake. Earth will then reach the opposite side of the sun to Mars (a solar-planetary conjunction). At this point Earth and Mars will be at their furthest distance from each other, and Mars will lie behind the sun.

The visible angular diameter of Mars varies from around ~3.5 arc-seconds at conjunction to up to around 25.1 arc-seconds at opposition. The visual surface area of Mars at opposition is around 51 times the visual surface area when at conjunction. So now is the time to capture images of Mars.

This is probably about as good as I can get with an 8 inch Newtonian, at a distance of 62.4 million km or 4897 earth diameters.

Note: A few of the labelled features (such as Kasei Valles) can't actually be resolved, but arrows point to their location.

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

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Astrometry.net job	n/a
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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