Deimos and Phobos – The two "tiny" moons of Mars, are actually visible in Earth-based amateur telescopes with careful application of image processing.

The moons are named are Greek gods that personified terror and dread (Deimos) and fear and panic (Phobos) to the ancient Greeks. With Mars almost at opposition on the 27th July (its closest point to Earth in 15 years) the next few weeks are the best opportunity to try and image Deimos and Phobos. Modern sensor technology is pretty astounding when coupled with a modest amateur hobbyist telescope. For this image (with Mars at 37.6 degrees elevation and hence compromised by an oblique and thicker section of the Earth's atmosphere to peer through), 200 still images were taken each with an exposure of 1 second and a low gain (low noise) setting on the CMOS sensor. Mars, of course, is over blown and excessively bright at these settings, but that is required to have any hope at all of bringing out Phobos and Deimos from the dark where they reign around the God of War (Mars). Luckily, at the time I imaged Mars, the 2 moons were sufficiently far away in their orbital path to not be lost in the planets glare.

A Televue 5x Powermate was coupled to the imaging cam to boost the focal length to somewhere over 7000mm (7m). That’s over 35 times more zoom than your standard 200mm camera zoom lens. The 200 frames were stacked using RegiStax software to boost the signal to noise ratio. Pretty happy to see I have been able to capture (albeit as pinpricks of light spread over a few pixels) the two tiny pieces of rock that orbit Mars - Phobos and Deimos.

The moon Phobos is just 22km in diameter whilst Deimos is a miniscule 12km in diameter, yet visible at 60.6 million kilometres away. A simple bit of trigonometry indicates this is like looking through a telescope from Melbourne and seeing a 3.35m object in London (if you straightened the visual path).

One theory posits that Mars once (or several times) had rings (like Saturn), which over time became gravitationally amalgamated into the two moons. Phobos (the innermost moon) is slowly spiralling in towards Mars and will one day disintegrate under the gravitational attraction of Mars and form a ring system like Saturn, and so the cycle of ring to moon and back to ring may be cyclical.