I attended the monthly meeting of the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association this evening. Our speaker was Peter Smith, of the Lunar & Planetary Lab, who is the Principal Investigator for the Phoenix Mission to Mars.
Peter gave us an excellent overview of the mission, which is currently on its way to Mars after launching last August. It is expected to land in the North Polar region on May 25th of this year. The lander has a robotic arm with a shovel and will explore the surface ice next to the landing site.
While I was at the meeting, my imaging system was starting itself up for an observing run. My targets tonight will be M42, M51, and M101 (although I may intercept it and change M101 to something else later). We've had a nice week or so of clear skies and I've been imaging with the new Epsilon every night, so there is plenty of data to process. But since it's my busy season I have not had any time to process it much yet. I do know that the very fast focal length of this telescope results in more severe color gradients than I have experienced before, so I will need to develop some skills to handle that.
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