Astronomy Picture of the Day 8-28-03

NASA ^ | 8-28-03 | Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell

[petuniasevan]

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2003 August 27

Big Mars from Hubble
Credit: J. Bell (Cornell U.), M. Wolff (SSI) et al., STScI, NASA

Explanation: At about 10 am Universal Time today, Mars and Earth will pass closer than in nearly 60,000 years. Mars, noticeably red, will be the brightest object in the eastern sky just after sunset. Tonight and through much of this week, many communities around the world are running a public Mars Watch 2003 campaign, where local telescopes will zoom in on the red planet. Pictured above is an image of Mars taken just last night from the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around the Earth. This image is the most detailed view of Mars ever taken from Earth. Visible features include the south polar cap in white at the image bottom, circular Huygens crater just to the right of the image center, Hellas Impact Basin - the large light circular feature at the lower right, planet-wide light highlands dominated by many smaller craters and large sweeping dark areas dominated by relatively smooth lowlands.

[petuniasevan]

A big OOPS from the APOD site! When I posted the 8/27/03 APOD this morning just before 6 AM CDT, it was the Elephant Rock/Mars image. Now I stayed up way too late and am posting the 8/28/03 APOD.

SURPRISE!

Looks like THIS APOD was supposed to post yesterday, and the Elephant Rock image today. So if I posted the 8/28/03 APOD, it would be a repeat!

Sigh.

So I am posting what is now YESTERDAY'S APOD as TODAY'S APOD, and the APOD I posted YESTERDAY is now listed in APOD'S archives as TODAY'S.

See what I mean: click on "discover the cosmos" to the left of the image above.

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[petuniasevan]

[Soaring Feather]

Thank you so much for the ping.

Mysterious and wonderful thought isn't it - the last people on earth to have seen this wonder where Neanderthal?

[firewalk]

Thanks for the ping
& good morning

[GodBlessRonaldReagan]

BTTT

[MikeD]

I have to admit that I'm not too jazzed up about this Mars alignment. Yeah, it's technically a hair closer than a few other recent ones, but it's nothing you can tell with your eyes. The biggest difference between this alignment and 1988 (the last "close" aligment) is that we have Hubble to take a few pictures.

Sorry to be the party pooper...

MD