{"id":157,"date":"2005-10-14T01:26:30","date_gmt":"2005-10-14T01:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/?p=157"},"modified":"2014-08-07T13:17:24","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T13:17:24","slug":"mars-up-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/2005\/10\/14\/mars-up-close\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars up-close"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nAt the moment Mars is making it&#8217;s closest approach to Earth for the next 18 years so <a title=\"Astro2 Home Page\" href=\"http:\/\/societies.nuim.ie\/astro2\">Astro2<\/a> thought this was too good a chance to miss! The only slight drawback was that Mars wasn&#8217;t well placed for observation from the Physics Observatory until after midnight. However, I offered to run a Mars watch at 1am and to my great surprise I wasn&#8217;t alone! There were in fact over 20 other people braving the cold with me!<\/p>\n<p>This was the first opportunity Astro2 had to use the physics department&#8217;s LX200 10&amp;quot; telescope. The conditions were not really ideal but we did nonetheless get a good look. We started off with a 15mm eyepiece giving a magnification of about 170X which allowed people to see some surface details while keeping the magnification low enough to keep the image nice and sharp. Once everyone had a look at the low magnification I changed to a 12mm eyepiece to increase the magnification to about 120X. At this stage the sky was getting very hazy and there was a good coating of dew on the corrector plate of the telescope but we could still easily see the black regions on the surface even though the image was quite fuzzy. I did try to up the magnification to about 280X with a 9mm eyepiece but that just wasn&#8217;t gonna happen in those conditions!<\/p>\n<p>All in all I think people had a good time and I&#8217;m really encouraged by such a high turnout for an Astro2 event at 1am!<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the moment Mars is making it&#8217;s closest approach to Earth for the next 18 years so Astro2 thought this was too good a chance to miss! The only slight drawback was that Mars wasn&#8217;t well placed for observation from the Physics Observatory until after midnight. However, I offered to run a Mars watch at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,515,501,503],"series":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-astronomy","tag-mars","tag-observation-log","tag-planet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7t9xK-2x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7998,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions\/7998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}