Not often do we Earthbound observers get a good look at Mars. It’s a small planet to begin with, and it spends most of its time far away. Usually it’s just a tiny, fuzzy orange blob in the eyepiece. The only time we get a good look at its surface markings, clouds, dust storms, and changing polar caps is during the months around its oppositions, which come a little more than two years apart. And not all Mars oppositions are created equal. The best ones come in bunches of two or three that repeat in a cycle 16 years long.
June 9th, 2001
Martian Flares Sighted Sky & Telescope
In the May 2001 issue of Sky & Telescope, Thomas Dobbins and William Sheehan discussed rare historical observations of bright, star-like flares from certain regions on the planet Mars. They suggested that the brightenings might be caused by specular reflections of sunlight off water-ice crystals in surface frosts or atmospheric clouds, specifically at times when the sub-Sun and sub-Earth points were nearly coincident and close to the planet’s central meridian (the imaginary line running down the center of the visible disk from pole to pole). Based on their analysis, Dobbins and Sheehan predicted that flares like those last reported in 1958 might erupt this week in Edom Promontorium, near the Martian equator at longitude 345