Saturday, July 28, 2007

Welcome to Areology

Credit: USGS, The Viking Project, NASA

This is a new blog I'm creating that will focus on the planet Mars. I'm a big fan of two astronomy-oriented photoblogs, Astronomy Picture of the Day and LPOD - Lunar Photo of the Day, and I hope to do something similar for Mars. I'm not a professional areologist (who is? ;) ), but I'm very interested in the subject and perhaps we can learn a few things about Mars together. Should I make any mistakes, please let me know; corrections are always welcome.

The above photo of part of the western hemisphere of Mars (click to enlarge) is a compilation mosaic of over 100 photos taken by the Viking 1 Orbiter in February 1980.

2 comments:

Tychocrater said...

Day 1, photo 1!
Good luck - you will find a daily POD soon takes over your evenings - especially if you are going to describe what's on each image. But its a great way to learn - and to improve writing skills!

Chuck Wood
LPOD

JDsg said...

Thank you for writing my first comment, Chuck! I do appreciate that very much.

I'm not sure if I can keep up a daily pace on this blog; however, I'm hoping to write up several days' worth of posts at once so I can be like you and the APOD guys.

BTW, I did know that about the Martian altimetry readings (due to MOLA), but I was being lazy that day, not getting a calculator out to verify the crater rim height to diameter percentage. ;) And as huge and deep as Hellas is, yes, the percentage is only about 0.3%.