Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Shooting Mars
By Keith Aparri Bacalso
This time, we started the offensive. “It’s our last good chance,” Christopher Go, amateur astronomer and top astrophotographer, “Mars is moving away.”
Not to say that the god of war is retreating permanently, every two years or so, a Mars opposition occurs wherein the Sun, the Earth and Mars line up with regard to their respective orbits in the solar system. “The orbits of the Earth and Mars around the Sun isn’t a perfect circle, it’s elliptical, more like an egg-shape,” Christopher chatters excitedly. The elliptical orbits result in the Earth and Mars having varying degrees of proximity. Thus, Mars was closest to earth in its race around the sun than it has been for 60,000 years last August 2003. Fast-forward two years later to present, “we just had our Mars opposition, too bad it’s been raining a lot lately, I haven’t been able to shoot as many photos.” The next alignment will be on December 24, 2007, a good two years away, “and it won’t be as close then.”
So, when the clouds presented an opening on the evening of December 3rd, Christopher set up his telescope and camera and invited people over to view Mars and shoot some pictures. “We’re really lucky here in Cebu, we have a surprisingly stable atmosphere,” indeed, when the cloud clears we have a seeing average of 8/10. During summer, the seeing index indicating how clear, we can, um, see, peaks at 10/10. He points out that other astrophotographers contend with seeing at 3/10.
“The skills I have, I had to learn by myself,” but with near perfect atmospheric conditions, “hopefully, this will encourage more amateur astronomers to pursue their hobby,” he continues as he unassumingly mentions that his pictures have been cited as one of the best earth-based photos of our neighboring planets. He also happens to be one of the top two astrophotographers, “the other guy is from England and he has to travel to Barbados in order to get good pictures, I get to stay at home,” Christopher adds with a laugh.
(December 7, 2005 issue)
Write letter to the editor. Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board. Click here. |
