The Eye of Mars

Ginger Mayfield wrote [on Shallow-Sky]:

I was able to see the dark areas in both the north and south, with Chryse (lighter area) in between with a red #25 filter. The very small North Polar Cap was visible with the yellow #15 filter. This was at 200x and 316x. It was so good to see something other than a blobby disk. Anyone else have any positive observations of Mars this weekend?

Yep! The seeing was inconsistent at Fremont Peak on Saturday night; the 5" Tak was giving the most consistently detailed view, though I saw as much detail (with more effort since focusing was tricky) in a C14. Acidalia, the NPC, and the dark areas around the NPC were obvious, there were some indistinct lighter areas in the general region of Tharsis (Tharsis clouds, possibly?) and there was striping elsewhere on the planet, but I was having my usual problem getting oriented (for some reason the left-right reversal doesn't bother me on the moon, where I have lots of landmarks, but confuses the heck out of me on Mars) and didn't realize until Jay Freeman pointed it out that the Eye of Mars was looking straight at us (thanks, Jay! I'd been wanting to see that feature and probably wouldn't have noticed it).

The eastern corner of the eye was prominent and easily visible, but Lacus Solis, the "pupil", was much more ephemeral; I had to wait for moments of good seeing when the subtle dark area would shimmer into place for an instant. I never could see the western edge of the eye.

I borrowed the Tak 128 for a while (I'm not sure it showed quite as much detail as the C14, but the image was a lot steadier which helps which sketching) and made one sketch (Acidalia didn't really look that much like a kidney bean -- oh, well): http://www.shallowsky.com/images/sketch/mars5899.jpg

By the way, we had nice views of Venus using darker filters so we could see the quarter phase. It was so bright it was causing *light pollution* in that part of the sky. :-) My friend is into satellites and we watched the International Space Station go over about 9:30PM MDT and it was almost as bright as Venus.

We noticed a bright satellite (perhaps first magnitude?) from Fremont Peak, and wondered what it was and if it could possibly be the ISS. Nobody had a satellite program handy (I really should download one). I suspect our sighting was later than 8:30pm PDT, though; could it have made another pass an hour or so later?