First observation: Mars

This morning my boys woke me up early, and instead of going back to bed after feeding them, I decided to go for a walk. As I got started, however, I saw that mars was practically overhead. So, I broke out my reflector, set it up on the street here in Boston, and honed in on its disk.

What I saw

I didn’t see anything surface-wise at either 200x or 400x (with a 2x barlow) besides what appeared to be a potential broad dark-ish spot in the middle of the disk. I think the view at 200x was better than the latter for picking up on this. Possible it’s a dust storm preventing us from seeing the surface, or maybe just bad seeing obscuring the image?

One thing I did notice was that it was easy to make out that it was a planet at only ~48x with a 25mm Plossl. Planets (as well as some deep sky objects (DSOs), I recall) require good seeing to make out more surface details, which I may have been lacking. I have yet to really acquaint myself with what to expect out of Boston-area seeing as I’m just getting back into it.