Mars

This January Mars will make its closest approach to Earth which happens every 26 months and this makes it the best time to view or image this planet. Most of the time, this planet is just too far and too small in our sky to see any kind of details but during these close approaches, it gets bigger and brighter and there can be a lot to see, even in small telescopes. Light and dark terrain, polar ice caps, sometimes clouds, and sometimes planet wide dust storms can be observed.

I used 23 images taken over the span of a few hours one night to create this short timelapse, capturing some surface features, the northern polar cap, and the rotation. A day on Mars is very close to the same as here on Earth. This was shot with a ZWO ASI662MC camera through a Celestron 9.25 XLT telescope.