2025 July 1

Mars Opposition Blog 1 July 2025

Richard McKim

2025 July 1st

To view Mars now from the UK at a reasonable altitude now, it must be located before sunset. Fortunately some of our members are expert at doing just that, and it is a pleasure to show images by Martin Lewis and Peter Tickner. The planet is still being actively followed by the Australasian observers (see the images from Akutsu, Lonsdale, Milika & Nicholas and Ito, and the drawings by Adachi), from Continental Europe, from Namibia (Clyde Foster) and from the USA. The southern hemisphere observers are now favoured by the planet’s changing declination. I particularly wish to draw attention to the image of Milika & Nicholas for their resolution of the Tharsis Montes.

The continued brightness of Hellas implies ground frost. The orographic clouds are still visible, and the equatorial cloud belt remains prominent (as expected at this Ls). The tiny diameter of the disk (now dipping below 5 arcseconds) is now a severe resolution test, but the high quality of the images here demonstrates that it is still very much worthwhile to attempt to observe. No obvious dust storm activity has been noticed lately. The planet is now too distant to reveal any of the seasonal rifts in the summer cap, but the detached Olympia still shows up in the latest images, while the very best ones hint at the presence of another outlier.

I am including an image from earlier in the year (January 3) from Gary Eason (Colchester), who used a 235 mm SCT. Contrast the size of the NPC with now!

It is now time for apparition maps. From Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, Vojtěch Jančura made a map from his own images, posted on the Cloudy Nights forum. And now Makoto Adachi, Mars Coordinator for ALPO Japan, has made this fine hand-drawn chart from the images available upon the ALPO Japan and BAA websites. Compare this with the 2022 map by Lewis upon our front page.

All future contributions will be acknowledged. We now have received data from a total of 108 observers, and the Word document attached to the front page has been updated. I am particularly grateful to Massimo Bianchi, Mars Coordinator of the Unione Astrofili Italiani, who invited me to copy the images from the observers in their online archive, an offer which had also been made at past oppositions by his predecessor, Paolo Tanga. Several UAI members have already contributed directly to the BAA.

If I continue to receive observations, I will continue to update this blog.