just to remind you that today, Mars is closest to Earth! Unfortunately, the weather has turned rather bad over here...
But two days ago, I watched Mars around 1:30 local time [11:30 UT] with my 8 inch Celestia telescope. Unfortunately, there is a lot of frustration around here, at 53.5 degs north, about Mars' low transit altitude of only about 20.5 degs!
Nevertheless, it was quite a spectacular sight in my telescope, despite blue/red fringes due to atmospheric dispersion at such low altitudes. I managed to spot Mars around 1:30 MEST in between the branches of the many huge trees around my house;-).
Without optical aids, it looked like an amazingly bright redish lantern in the sky, at -3 mags!
By incorporting the appropriate Gaussian blur corrresponding to my (ideal) resolution (0.6") and using Mars' opposition size of 26", I prepared an image for you that is very close indeed to what I saw. Note the rose-white color! Mars was so bright in the telescope that it hurt in my eyes and I mostly used a blue or orange Wratten filter both to enhance the surface details and to reduce the glare.
![Image](http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/images/marsopp.jpg)
Bye Fridger
PS: In the original post of the above image, I had forgotten to add the polar ice cap as it is seen today. Nobody seemed to have realized, though;-). Anyway, now it's there.
For texture freaks: Mars is RED and not muddy brown. If you take the above color and brightness reduce it, you get very close in color to what the HST photos look like...