Astronomy Picture of the Day - Solis Lacus: The Eye of Mars

APOD.NASA.gov ^ | 1 Oct, 2020 | Image Credit & Copyright: Damian Peach

[MtnClimber]

Explanation: As telescopes around planet Earth watch, Mars is growing brighter in night skies, approaching its 2020 opposition on October 13. Mars looks like it's watching too in this view of the Red Planet from September 22. Mars' disk is already near its maximum apparent size for earthbound telescopes, less than 1/80th the apparent diameter of a Full Moon. The seasonally shrinking south polar cap is at the bottom and hazy northern clouds are at the top. A circular, dark albedo feature, Solis Lacus (Lake of the Sun), is just below and left of disk center. Surrounded by a light area south of Valles Marineris, Solis Lacus looks like a planet-sized pupil, famously known as The Eye of Mars . Near the turn of the 20th century, astronomer and avid Mars watcher Percival Lowell associated the Eye of Mars with a conjunction of canals he charted in his drawings of the Red Planet. Broad, visible changes in the size and shape of the Eye of Mars are now understood from high resolution surface images to be due to dust transported by winds in the thin Martian atmosphere.

[MtnClimber]

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For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then zoom by moving the magnifying glass over an area and then clicking. The side bars will move the zoomed area over the photograph.

[MtnClimber]

[MtnClimber]

Pinging the APOD list.

[Grimmy]

I see a bunny face and ears in profile right about dead center of that planet.

[EEGator]

Like the Playboy bunny, but facing the wrong way?

[caww]

Wonder what that bright white area is at the bottom? Perhaps just the camera angle.

[EEGator]

“The seasonally shrinking south polar cap is at the bottom...”

Not a very detailed explanation.

[rlmorel]

I see a dead anteater with its legs sticking straight up in the air.

[Alas Babylon!]

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

[MtnClimber]

The polar caps on Mars are frozen carbon dioxide also known as dry ice.

[Jamestown1630]

My favorite Mars story has always been Bradbury’s ‘Martian Chronicles’. They made a video of the stories in the 1970s; this first episode was pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_drOFPE6fmA

[null and void]

I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day. . . .

And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.

[diatomite]

"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." - H. G. Wells - War of the Worlds

[Jamestown1630]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatermass_and_the_Pit_(film)

Pretty good early Brit Sci-Fi. (You used to be able to see it on YouTube, but I can’t find it now.)

[hoagy62]

It’s a treat to hear the late Sir Richard Burton read “War of the Worlds” for Jeff Wayne’s musical of the same name. Liam Neeson has also done an updated version, and it’s also quite good.

[null and void]

Look for “Five Million Years to Earth”

[AFB-XYZ]

I see Hercules in profile. Imposing musculature, but his beard looks awful. :-)

[ADemocratNoMore]

> It’s a treat to hear the late Sir Richard Burton read “War of the Worlds” for Jeff Wayne’s musical of the same name.

Quite right. Both the album version and the CD are worth having. I bought the DVD some years ago from a music store in England through Amazon UK and converted the PAL video to NTSC on my computer.

Speaking of Richard Burton, I just found this...

Richard Burton out-takes from Jeff Wayne’s “War of the Worlds” recording session.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_Wpi2TWCVA