These are CCD images of the planet Mars, taken by member Hank Adams from West Orange, NJ.

A few comments about this latest image:
It was taken with a SBIG ST7 CCD Camera, mounted on a Celestron CG11. The working aperture was 280 mm. (11"), fl 5600mm.(220"), the filter was a Wratten 25.
These cropped images were taken in the maximum resolution mode with 9 micron pixels. This works out to 0.33 arcsec per pixel, which is grossly oversampled. Seeing estimated to be about 2" of arc. Image processing done with CCDOPS, a dos program which may down loaded from www.sbig.com

They were taken on May 20 1999, at 21:27:59 EDT. At that time the CM of Mars was 284.3 deg. The polar axis was tilted 36.58 deg to the east.

The Polar Axis is tilted 21.98 deg toward the Earth.
The prominent dark areas are Syris Major, Utopia, Iapygia.
The bright area is Hellas, the polar cap is faintly visible.

Enjoy!
Get out your Observers Handbook first! Or see pg.106 April 99 S&T