About the time you receive this newsletter, Mars will be at opposition, up all-night and unmistakably orange and bright, blazing in the southern sky. While amateurs have long anticipated this summer’s close approach, the popular media--in what is normally a slow news month--has just now caught on. Weekly magazines, cable news channels and even local television stations all feature this record breaking event. Each day for the next few weeks, stories will run in newspapers around the world: try this google.com news search. For positive events in the sky, this is about as big as it ever gets.

Not surprisingly, the web has an overwhelming number of Mars pages. A recent online search for “Mars at closest approach” returned over 34,000 hits! Just in case it’s cloudy (the only acceptable excuse for not following the instructions above), here are some of my favorites.

Skyandtelescope.com has a comprehensive observing guide and a Mars Profiler applet to display which side of the is planet visible for your date and time, matching your view whether normal, inverted or mirror-reversed. A stand-alone program Mars Previewer II is also available; this program renders Mars's globe in size and phase for direct comparison with sketches or images. Speaking of which, amateur astroimagers are again outdoing themselves with detailed, colorful images. You need not look far for some great examples: I’ve especially enjoyed those posted to our own club's web page and yahoo group. 

For really close views of Mars, there are none better than those from NASA and JPL. A good starting point is the Mars Exploration Program home page. For images from all planetary missions, go directly to at JPL’s Planetary Image Atlas. A nice selection is also available at Welcome to the Planets: follow the links here from thumbnail highlights to short non-technical figure captions, and then to the original-release and technical details and even links to download the full-sized images from the Planetary Photojournal. Many of the Mars images from JPL were taken with the Mars Global Surveyor Orbiter and are available from JPL and Malin Space Science Systems.

Lastly, here’s a gem that not on the web, but a book to peruse offline, day or night: William K. Hartmann's A Traveler’s Guide to Mars: The Mysterious Landscapes of the Red Planet. This book has everything you would want to know to plan your own visit. And this author knows his terrain: he participated in missions from Mariner to Mars Global Surveyor and sprinkles personal anecdotes throughout. He begins with a brief history of exploration and overviews possible future sample return missions. Hartmann explains the latest scientific theories and controversies with clear analogies and remarkable insight. For example the immense canyon of Valles Marineris is much less like the Grand Canyon than the rifting zones of the Gulf of California or the Red Sea. Hartmann makes the red planet become real: depicting martian features using terrestrial landscapes, for example, gullies in Iceland or deserts near Tucson. In this way, Hartmann shows us what we would see if we were really standing on Mars. But did you know that there is no single vantage point on its surface from which to view the whole, immense shape of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system? And, while waiting for clouds to clear, hours can be spent using the image numbers in the book to locate the actual images form the online databases. Now that’s as close to actually exploring Mars as anyone will get in the foreseeable future.

While you’re out surfing the web for Mars, check out the new Moondark web site. Yes: broadband internet has finally come to my neighborhood, and as you can tell, I’ve used it to make a big dent in all those Mars-links on the web. Along with a new internet service provider, come new email and home page addresses for this column: http://home.comcast.net/~dmiller5879/moondark/. In fact, I’m planning a thorough web site overhaul just as soon as I finish setting up a new router and wireless laptop card. But at the end of the day, installation woes, IRQ conflicts and the "blue screen of death" are plenty of motivation to step outside, feel the cool dampness, listen to the chorus of crickets, and enjoy this unique Martian encounter. Hmmm...I wonder if I can use WiFi to do some remote observing from inside my house? Then I could surf and observe Mars at the same time...

Bookmark those links: Mars-mania will continue at least through early 2004 with the arrival of three spacecraft (including two US rovers and ESA's Beagle 2) currently on their way to the Red Planet. The background image was downloaded from the NASA PDS Map-A-Planet web site for Mars' Valles Marineris near 8° S and 74°  W. Moondark is written by Doug Miller, published on the web, and printed in the Delmarva Star Gazers' Star Gazer News. This document was last revised on 31 August 2003. Text and images copyright © 2003 by Douglas C. Miller, All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without prior permission.