Hi this is Graham from Jenham's Astro if you looked at my channel recently you've seen i've
made quite a few videos of the planets and for most of those i've been using one of the maksutov
telescopes like this skymax 127. so last year we looked at mars in the autumn and we also looked at
jupiter and saturn well christmas has come and gone lockdown season what is there to
look at in the night sky in terms of planets well right now there's a couple of things and
one is a return to mars. mars is still high in the sky in the evenings and in this video we're
going to look at how it compares now in january 2021 with how it looked back near opposition
and to illustrate a little bit of what we're going to see i hope i've
the special effects department has gone to town again and we're going to look
at the sort of orbital positions of the planets as they were then and compare them to where they are
now and i'm going to use this highly sophisticated model of the solar system that you can see here
so i've drawn out a view of the solar system looking from above now the size of these circles
is not completely scientifically accurate and in fact it's determined by the size of this plate mat
and the size of this small plate but never mind you'll get the idea basically we've got the sun
at the centre here we go and then we're going to place the planet earth
on the blue circle blue is the orbit of the earth around the sun and here is mars now basically
this was the position back at opposition and that was in october 2020 so you can see that
the two planets are close together and that's when we took the took advantage of that and
looked at looked at the planets with this skymax and also with the c90 and the 102
was now fast forward to today the planets have moved around their orbits
and earth and mars are oops quite a lot further apart so basically i'm going to show back to that
video of opposition and where they are today and we should see a few differences so this is
mars back at opposition october 2020. the planet was a mere 38 million miles away from earth so
it was very close to earth and as a result it was very bright so it was rising in the east
in the late evening and we were waiting for it to rise high enough and it was magnitude minus 2.6
and it was huge it was 22 arc seconds across now this video and also the one taken more recently
use the skymax 127 and i've used a two times barlow to get a good image scale but certainly
back at opposition there was no problem making mars big enough to fill the sensor of the camera
and then if we fast forward to now january 2021 mars is 100 million miles away,
104 million miles away almost three times further away and it's much much fainter still an obvious
orange star-like object but much fainter and now it shrunk to a third of the size it was opposition
eight arc seconds now this is a direct comparison of a stacked image so i've used the Registax tool
to image mars and produce one image opposition and here is the image from last night so you can
see aside from the obvious size difference that mars is now presenting a phase so where we could
see the whole disc back at opposition the whole disc was illuminated now we're seeing only part of
the planet and that's what you'd expect given the relative positions of the planets around the sun
so hope it's been useful if you found this video interesting then please subscribe to Jenham's
Astro and look back through some of the previous videos as i mentioned there are videos of this
telescope the 127 comparing it with some different Maksutovs and lots of content using this scope
with and without different accessories like an ADC for example and now we've got
electric focus motor so i'm looking forward to to using that some more
so in the coming months i'm going to try to use the 127 to look at some more planetary
targets and i'll share the results with you okay thanks for watching bye for now.