The Case for Life on Mars

February 19, 2010

While no one’s found palm trees and skyscrapers on Mars, there’s still a serious search going on for primitive forms of life on the Red Planet. After all, Mars isn’t all that different from Earth… it has a thin atmosphere and seasons and a source of water somewhere below the surface.

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Posted in Solar System Observing

A Short History of Life on Mars

February 15, 2010

The idea of “Men from Mars” has been with us for more than a century now, thanks to writers like H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  And movies like “Mars Attacks” and “War of the Worlds” are good fun.  But what’s the real story of the search for life on Mars?  Today we tell the tale of the search for life on the Red Planet…

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Posted in Celestial Objects

Video of a Trip to Mars

February 11, 2010

Let’s have a little fun today with an animated trip to Mars. This video shows… in amazingly realistic detail… the journey of the Mars Exploration Rover mission in 2003. The two Rovers… Spirit and Opportunity… were supposed to operate for just 90 Martian days during their mission to look for signs of water and life-friendly geological processes. But they’re both still going strong.

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Posted in Celestial Objects

The Tiny Moons of Mars

February 8, 2010

You can see many things when you look at Mars through a small telescope, but you can’t see its two puny moons, Phobos and Deimos. Few have ever seen these moons directly. Even the largest scopes show them as faint points of light. But they’re there, and recent space probes have snapped close-up images of these potato-shaped satellites as they zip and wobble around the red planet.

In an odd way, the presence of Mars’s moons was predicted more than two centuries before they were discovered in 1877.

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Posted in Celestial Objects, Solar System Observing

A Window on the Sky

February 4, 2010

We haven’t done an observing tip in a while.  So here’s one that’s brief but a little… unusual.  If you like to look at the sky with your unaided eye or binoculars, but don’t like getting a stiff neck and sore back, then today’s idea might be worth trying out.  It takes a little practice, but it’s simple and works amazingly well.

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Posted in Telescopes and Observing

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