Primordial Groove

As you may know, on Aug. 27th, Mars will be closer to the Earth that it has been in 60,000 years.
As we get closer to the date, I'd like to see some amateur or professional photo's from members here at II.
I, unfortunately, do not have a camera/telescope in which to participate but I am none-the-less excited about what you may have.

Abacus

This is a cool picture. Unfortunately, I didn't take it myself. I can't afford that kind of equipment.

Shadowy Man

Technically, you can, as you can write a proposal to use HST. Realistically, a non-professional will never get a proposal accepted (as it is almost 90% of all proposals are rejected).

Abacus

So my best shot would be to build and launch my own space telescope. Well, gotta go. I better to get to work on it.

HeatherD

It's unlikely that you'll find any Earth-bound telescope that can image the planets as well as HST. There are some adaptive-optics scopes that promise to come close (I've heard rumours they might even surpass it)

But you can take some really nice, not as nice as HST, images of Mars with just some "inexpensive" amateur equipment. A decent telescope, mount, guiding equipment, CCD camera, filters, and computer for processing are most of what you'd need. It also takes some experience, so you might have to wait until the next "closest" opposition.

I have an Intes-Micro MN56 (5" f/6 Maksutov-Newtonian [MakScope]) just for visual use with a pretty stable mount (Vixen GP-DX) with tripod. I also have a SkySensor 2000 a "goto" controller and guider.

A regular on the Yahoo group MakScopes <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MakScopes/> has taken some really nice images of Mars. Here is his home page and, what you really want to see, some nice images of Mars at "The Great Opposition of 2003"

Autonemesis

They will. In the infrared, the various designs for OWL-class* telescopes are aimed at resolving the disks of extrasolar planets.

* Over-Whelmingly Large

Those Russian Maks are awesome. I have a Intes PLUS MK91, 9" f/13.6 (the one shown on ITE's website happens to be mine). I use a color video camera and a DV-bridge to capture DVD quality video. Processing the frames afterwards, I come up with images like this:

http://www.batch.com/astro/mars.html

Majestyk

Just want to say that Mars being so close to the full moon has made for a beautiful sky over the last couple of nights, with just the naked eye.

Shake

Wow! Those pictures are still quite amazing to amateur astronomers such as myself. I thought that it was really cool on the Mars page, that you could actually follow the rotation of the planet!

All I've got is a little 4" reflector which was home built from a kit, and I've had it for 20+ years. The mirror is in need of a good cleaning. I used it once upon a time to watch a good eclipse of the moon (near total). In college I took a course called Observational Astronomy and actually got to spend a few evenings using the schools' observatory to look at some objects in the (very cold) night sky. I'd recommend such a course to anyone in college with a free elective to fill.