BabyPowdr here, boldly going where no man has gone before! Well, actually, looking where many people have looked before. What? At Mars. Mars... the red planet, and also my favourite.

Okay, so we've probably all seen Mission to Mars, Mars Attacks, and several other hit movies based on Martians from, you guessed it, Mars. As far as we know, the planet doesn't really have life on it. Not that advanced, anyways. They think there are canals on it. Well, we don't really know, do we? But there are some things we know for sure. Mars has ice caps. Mars is red from rust in the soil. Mars has dust storms. The list goes on. I'll try to educate you on Mars... then later when you look for yourself, you can see what you can see.

MARS *dun dun dunnn.... Space Odessy 2001 theme*

The name Mars means the bringer of War.

Mars has two satellites (moons), Deimos "panic" and Phobos "fear". Phobos is potato shaped, because she was sucked out of the Asteriod Belt seperating the innner, and outer solar systems. She is still potato shaped because she doesnt have enough mass for her gravity to force her spherical. Kewl, eh? Mars has no rings. Her atmosphere is mostly Carbon Dioxide.

Atmospheric composition (by volume):

Major : Carbon Dioxide (CO2) - 95.32% ; Nitrogen (N2) - 2.7% Argon (Ar) - 1.6%; Oxygen (O2) - 0.13%; Carbon Monoxide (CO) - 0.08%
Minor (ppm): Water (H2O) - 210; Nitrogen Oxide (NO) - 100; Neon (Ne) - 2.5; Hydrogen-Deuterium-Oxygen (HDO) - 0.85; Krypton (Kr) - 0.3; Xenon (Xe) - 0.08

This data was gathered from http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html.

Ha ha, with all this I forgot some of the basics. Mars is the fourth planet from the sun, its day is 24.6 Earth hours (1 Earth day is sometimes called 1 sol), one Mars year equals 1.88 Earth years equals 687 Earth days equalling 669 Mars days. Its diameter: 6792 kilometers vs. 12,756 kilometers for the Earth.

The Martian surface gravity is 0.38 times Earth's gravity (about 1/3). The surface is dotted with impact crators, channels carved by large floods, dusty soils, and rocky terrain. Mars is home to the tallest volcano in the Solar System: Olympus Mons, 21 kilometers high and 600 kilometers across, the size of the state of Arizona. It also has the largest canyon system in the Solar System: Valles Marineris, 4000 kilometers long and up to 11 kilometers deep. If placed on Earth, Valles Marineris would stretch from California to Washington D.C.

But what, may you ask, has brought Mars back into my life? Well, no, I wasn't routing through my grade nine science notes on a quest for acceleration formulas again... it's the fact that this month, Mars is going to be the closest to Earth that it will be in another 60.000 years or so. You can see the polar caps with a good telescope, they are predicting. And what are we going to do? Not only look, but take pictures with this fancy camera attachement to the scope. I want to share this with you, so that hopefully you can get an oppotunity to look at Mars, up close, even if you don't really get to see the caps. The prime viewing dates are near the end of the month. We're looking at around the 27, 28, 29, 30th of August. But you can see it now, around 11pm (Eastern Standard Time), or earlier nearer the Atlantic coast.

For more information, Search Google. I wish I knew what exact site to go to, but alas, I don't. Hopefully you find something, if not, just wander outside around 11pm (Eastern Standard Time) with your telescope. If you are facing South, it's on your left hand side in front of you. (That's to the East, folks). If you are facing North, it will be on your right hand side, behind you. So turn around! LoLz. Then focus your telescope (or binoculars, just for a less close-up look) on the RED STAR. It's not really a star, it's Mars. Wanna know how you can tell? Planets are brighter than stars, and they are all visible only on the ecliptic. That's the line or path that the moon follows. So once you've found the red dot, focus your telescope and Voila! Mars...! *Space Odyssey 2001 theme*

Off to watch some old Star Trek...

Lata Daze -- uhm, well, Nights...
~BabyPowdr