Akkana's Mars Sketches (earlier than 2003)

Mars FAQ

Stacking sketches: Chix Stack Mars!.

My sketches of targets other than Mars.

Some Great Mars Sketch Pages: Jane Houston | Ron Bee | Wes Stone

2001 Opposition
	Mars on 7/8/2001. CM=22. North is up. Seeing was very poor (looking through clouds). Note how prominent the north polar region is, in contrast to the prominent south polar region seen on the sketches from last week. Apparently there's some sort of large dust storm going on; I wonder if that's why the northern area (up on this sketch) is so smudgy, and the shape of Acidalia isn't as obvious as it usually is? Though the dust storm is supposedly primarily in the southern hemisphere. The dark area south of center and east of the meridian is probably Sinus Meridiani.
	Mars on 7/02/2001 at 10:30 pm PDT (left, north is up) and 11:30pm (right, north is upper left -- sorry about the funky rotation). I think the CM is somewhere around 45 for the left image, 60 for the right.
	Mars on 11:30pm 6/29/2001, CM=115 (left) and 10:30pm 6/30/2001, CM=105. Made with an AP 180 and a Tak FS102 on the left, a Tak FS128 on the right.
	Mars on 6/23/2001 at 12:30am PDT. Made with a 5" refractor. East and west are reversed as seen in a refractor. Central meridian is about 195 degrees. I think the dark feature in the south is a combination of Maria Cimmerium and Sirenum; the less distinct features in the north are perhaps Trivium Charontis, or Stymphalius Lacus (two different names for the same feature -- one problem with observing Mars is that no two Mars maps use the same nomenclature) and Thoth, with Elysium making a somewhat circular light spot in between. (Another observer tonight saw that spot as being lighter; I didn't, so it's not shown that way in my sketch). Both polar caps are visible, but the southern cap is much bigger than the northern one. It's possible that the bright feature in the north is not the north polar cap, but Eridania.
1999 Opposition
	Mars on 5/8/99, 11:45pm (left), through a Takahashi FS128 at about 200x, and again on 5/10/99 11:33pm (right). Image inverted after scanning to match real orientation. Features visible include the North Polar Cap (top), Acidalia (upper right), Tharsis region (light areas on left) and part of Lacus Solis, the "Eye of Mars" (coming in from lower right).
1997 Opposition
	Mars in black-and-white on 4/16/97.
	After making the previous B/W sketch, I went inside and made another sketch of Mars, filling in the colors I'd just seen.