Launch our Mars Profiler tool!

To compare what you see on Mars with a map, you need to know which side of the planet you’re seeing. Sky & Telescope's Mars Profiler can tell you that and more for any date and time. Best of all, it shows a map of Mars so that you can identify any bright and dark markings you see.

Here's what Mars Profiler looks like:

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How to Use the Mars Profiler

The display has four parts. At upper left is the date and time; when the routine opens, it is initialized to the present time, as determined from your computer's clock. Change the date and time and click the Recalculate button to see results for another time, or click on the buttons in the next row to step backward or forward in increments of 1 day or 1 hour. Our Mars Profiler uses Universal Time (UT, essentially the same as Greenwich Mean Time), and beneath the time buttons it shows what we think is the offset between UT and your local time, based on your computer's current settings. When changing the time manually, enter the Universal Time that corresponds to the local time when you will be observing.

At upper right is a map of Mars, based on computer graphics by planetary cartographer Ralph Aeschliman, showing the planet's main albedo features (dark and light markings). When the routine opens, south is up, matching the inverted view seen in a Newtonian reflector in the Northern Hemisphere. The central-meridian (CM) longitude is shown at the top, and major bright and dark features are labeled for easy identification. A red circle indicates the area of the planet's surface pointed directly toward Earth.

The map is rectangular; remember to mentally wrap it onto the side of a globe. This means features away from the red circle will appear foreshortened on the real, spherical Mars as seen in your telescope.

Below the time buttons and the map are three buttons you can use to change the orientation of the map to match the view in your telescope. "Direct view" puts celestial north up and celestial east to the left. "Inverted view," the default, puts south up and west to the left. "Mirror reversed" puts north up and west to the left, matching the view in most catadioptric (mirror-lens) and refractor telescopes used with a star diagonal in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Martian longitude scale appears along the south edge of the map in the direct and mirror-reversed views. Note that as used here, "north," "south," "east," and "west" refer to directions on the sky, not directions on the surface of the red planet itself, where Martian longitude increases to the west.

Three Faces of Mars
Ed Grafton of Houston, Texas, used an SBIG ST-6 CCD camera and Celestron 14-inch telescope for some of the last apparition's best images of Mars. Each is a composite of frames taken through red, green, and blue filters. CM is the longitude of the planet's central meridian. South is up. The prominent dark form near the center of the June 11th image is Syrtis Major.
Courtesy Ed Grafton.

Mars rotates in the same direction as Earth. So from hour to hour, its surface markings move from left to right if your telescope presents a direct view (with celestial north up and east to the left). But most astronomical telescopes present a south-up view or a north-up view that is mirror-reversed; in either case, the red planet's surface markings will appear to move from right to left as the hours go by. You can see this by clicking the "+ 1 hour" button repeatedly.

A Martian day lasts 24 hours 37 minutes. So in one Earth day of 23 hours 56 minutes, Mars doesn't quite make one full turn on its axis. This means that if you look at Mars in a telescope at 24-hour intervals, the planet seems to have rotated "backward" by a small amount. You can see this by clicking the "+ 1 day" button repeatedly.

The bottom part of Mars Profiler's display shows data about Mars's appearance corresponding to the date and time of the map, such as its brightness and distance from Earth. (Note: One astronomical unit (a.u.), based on the mean Earth-Sun distance, is 149.598 million kilometers or 92.956 million miles.) Illumination refers to the planet's phase (100% is full). The position angle (p.a.) of Mars's north pole is measured counterclockwise from celestial north through east. So a p.a. of 10° means the planet's north pole is tipped slightly east of celestial north, and a p.a. of 350° means it is tipped slightly west.

The angular diameter is how large Mars appears in the sky, measured in arcseconds (1/3600 degree) and elongation refers to how far Mars is from the Sun in the sky. The central-meridian longitude is the Martian longitude of the imaginary line down the center of the planet's disk from pole to pole. It's also helpful to know which of the planet's poles is tipped toward Earth, and whether the planet's axis is straight up and down or tipped clockwise or counterclockwise. 

Launch our Mars Profiler tool! If you see any problems with this tool, or any of our interactive tools, please send an email to [email protected].