by Akkana Peck
I finally got a reasonably good look at Mars last night -- my first of the season where I could see more than a few smeary blurs.
Looking out my garage door with the 6" Cave at 11pm PDT, I could easily see Hellas on the limb, and the dark area including Syrtis Major and Maria Tyrrhenum and Hadriacum surrounding it. Syrtis Major appeared split, with a smaller finger protruding off the east side of it, longer than the finger shown in the online ALPO albedo map. East of Syrtis, Sinus Sabaeus extended off toward the limb, though I couldn't see any detail of its shape other than that it was long and thin. On the limb opposite Hellas there was a dark patch -- Utopia, I think -- flanked by lighter patches.
I made a sketch of the unfiltered view, then tried my motley collection of filters. Orange seemed to bring out the dark areas; pale yellow did the same to a lesser extent, made Syrtis Major a LOT darker, and seemed to help compensate for air steadiness fluctuations; blue and violet brought out a couple of light patches on the limbs, in the area of Elysium and Cydonia. I didn't see the polar cap. I also have a red filter, but it wasn't much help.
I made a sketch of the view through the violet filter (which made the limb clouds -- if that's what they were -- stand out most clearly) and was going to start on a yellow-filter sketch when the air got a lot less steady and the view deteriorated, at which point I retreated inside to download some software.
I got the new Mars Previewer 2 installed on the win 98 laptop, and discovered that although it does indeed get the system date, I found it harder to use in other ways than MP1 since the bitmap didn't look much like the visual view and it wouldn't identify some major features, like Hellas. Some day I'll make my peace with this program -- it's free, it's cool, and I wish I found it more useful.
However, then I discovered that Bill Grey has a new update out for Guide 7 which handles planetary features! I downloaded the update and the extra planets.zip file, and that gave me the ability to show Mars with the major features labelled (it uses an ALPO bitmap which corresponds much better to the visual view than the one in MP2). Not only that, but he does the same thing for the moon! It's not a serious moon-atlas program -- the bitmap he shows for the moon is pretty rough -- but there are quite a few features listed for the moon, over 1500, vs only 9 for Mars (though this is easily changed, since the features are stored in a human-editable ASCII file).
The web page claims that you can right-click on a feature and get information about it (e.g. crater diameters on the moon) but I haven't gotten that to work yet; I've mailed the author asking about it. You can also "Go to planet feature", which I haven't tried. If you use Guide, be sure to download the upgrade and try it out.