*******Special Announcementt*********
17 April., 1997
From Coordinator, Daniel M. Troiani
New Mars computer program available at Sky & Telescope WEB Site!
Which Side of Mars Is Visible?
To compare what you see on Mars with a map, you need to know which side
of the planet you're looking at -- in other words, the longitude of the
disk's central meridian.
The central meridian is the imaginary line down the center of the disk
from pole to pole. The table here gives its Martian longitude (in
degrees) at 0:00 Universal Time every day through the end of May. Read
across the top to the month, then down to the date (which is also in
Universal Time).
http://www.skypub.com/whatsup/mars97.html
Bonus! Windows 3.1/3.11/95 users are welcome to download Mars Previewer
by Leandro Rios, an amateur astronomer in Argentina. Rios based his
freeware program on the same algorithm used to generate the following
table; these calculations are explained in Sky & Telescope's September
1990 issue, page 296, and a simpler BASIC version of the program
(MARS.BAS) is available on our Software Page (in line 110, change the
value of DT to its current value, 62 seconds). After you download
mp.zip (3.2 megabytes), unzip it and run setup.exe to install the
software. (The setup utility is in Spanish but behaves like any other
Windows 95 setup program, so you should be able to run it without
difficulty.) When you run Mars Previewer, make sure you enter dates in
dd/mm/yyyy format and set your time zone relative to Greenwich Mean
Time (positive numbers to the west, negative to the east). Click on the
small image above to pull up a full-resolution screen shot (39K jpeg)
of Mars Previewer in action for 0 hours Universal Time on 22 March 1997
(five days after the red planet's favorable 1997 opposition). If you
have any questions about the program, you can contact Rios by e-mail at
leandror@ba.net.
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* Clear Skies!! *
* *
* Daniel M. Troiani *
* Mars Section Coordinator, *
* Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers *
* Schaumburg, IL *
* Astronomer and Assistant Show Production, *
* Cernan Earth and Space Center, *
* Triton College *
* dtroiani@triton.cc.il.us *
* *
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