Mars

Good morning from Minneapolis. The press on the close approach of Mars has been voluminous, but I did come across two items I thought were especially cool. The first is this page at Astronomy.com which offers the two of the best composite Hubble photos of Mars I’ve seen (when you get to the page, click the pictures to see them full-size). The second are these snaps that friend Matt forwarded, along with this email:

Here are some photos of Mars from last night. I shot them with my Fuji S2Pro, a Nikon 200mm 2.8 lens, and a TC-200 2x Tele Converter. The top 2 are short exposures, while the bottom 2 are 10 and 30 seconds respectively. It was interesting to see how fast that little orange ball was moving, or rather how quickly we (the earth) is rotating.

Enjoy the snaps; click to see them super sized.