From Elisabeth SIEGEL
® . . . . . . . . Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 15:57:10 +0100
Subject: RE:
Seasons Greetings
Dear Masatsugu,
Thank you so much for your mail. I
read it on December 25th and was eager to answer you right away, but I had to
have the Christmas guests out of the house before I could find the necessary
time, so I hope you'll excuse me for the delay in writing back to you.
I am very sorry to hear about your
health problems. I sincerely hope that your doctor will be able to find the
right medication for you; I know, admittedly not from direct personal
experience, but from the experience of several close relatives, that even
pretty severe heart conditions can be eased marvellously by the right kind of
medication. Until you feel better, please take care!
No, we did not have a white
Christmas this year (in fact we seldom do in
Don't be sorry for not writing me
before uploading my drawings to the CMO website! I usually visit the website
every day, so I saw it almost immediately, and then I knew that you had
received my drawings - and I just felt very honored
and pleased, as I think I already told you.
I shall now comment on the bright
spots of Nov.
19 and 28, in
response to your e-mail:
I also got the chance to re-visit
one of the areas in question, on Dec. 22, with the CM being 197° at the time I
finished the I.L. drawing. I looked for the "Elysium spot", but
nothing unusual was seen, be it in I.L. or any color
filter. The angular diameter had shrunk to 9.1" by then, as compared to
the 12.4" at the time of the observation of the bright spot on November
19.
I must say that spontaneously, I
tend to agree more with you than with Richard McKim
in his interpretation of the Nov. 19 (Elysium) spot as being surface frost. The
Elysium spot was seen in W 47 ONLY, and for all I know, this would place it
rather high in the atmosphere; I agree with you that anything representing pure
surface frost (with no obscuring cloud or haze above it) should have been
visible in W 25 too, and for that matter, in all color
filters - similar to the filter behavior of the polar
caps when they're free of their obscuring hoods. I must say that I don't quite
understand why McKim believes it to be surface frost.
I am glad that you asked me if the
spot was glittering, because later I've realized that
I actually (unwittingly) left out an important (?) piece of information in my
observing notes describing the appearance of the Elysium spot: It was
definitely NOT glittering. In fact it wasn't "brilliant" at all, as
long as one takes that word to mean having a sort of "glowing" or
"sparkling" quality to it. Its brightness solely had to do with its
most unusual color: whitish, which is something
rarely seen in W 47 (where a bright area will usually be a light violet, with a
shining, "brilliant" quality to it). Think of a patch of snow lying
on a dark and barren, rocky surface, on a day where the sky is completely
overcast. There will be no direct reflected sunlight glittering from the snow,
but the snow will still catch your eye as being very bright in contrast to the
rest of the landscape. - This was the kind of brightness displayed by the
Elysium spot: a rather dull white, surrounded by the deep dark violet of the W
47 in an area that was otherwise not bright in any way in this filter. If it
sounds like a very strange sight, this description has probably hit the mark. I
have twice before (in 1993) seen a glittering, starlike
point in W 47, which however happened to be at the core of some larger cloud
verified in other filters; but the Elysium spot was not glittering, and not starlike (as I wrote in the notes, it had a certain visible
extent, albeit small, and I was able to marvel at its seemingly perfectly
circular shape). I think I can safely say that it was the strangest sight I
have seen on Mars so far (although my observing experience is limited).
You also ask me how long it showed
up. As it was only seen in W 47, I can only say that it was visible during the
time where I used this filter; I only record the beginning and end times for color filter work as a whole, not the specific times where
I apply each single filter, but from experience I would say: I must have
applied the W 47 filter for about 10 minutes, and since the W 47 was the last
filter I used on that specific evening, it seems safe to conclude that I used
it from about 18:35 to 18:45 UT. The spot was readily visible during all of
this time.
Please allow me to add another note
concerning the "Ascraeus Mons spot" of
November 28. As I have already mentioned in the notes to this observation, in
some respects this spot differed from the Nov. 19 spot: this spot (as seen in W
47) was contained within a larger bright area and did not appear whitish, but
light violet (and this time, brilliant). The reason I saw it at all was that it
appeared as a very dense, round spot in the midst of an already bright area.
But on the other hand, this dense, round spot was so conspicuous that my
immediate reaction, with the Elysium spot nine days earlier in mind, was a
rather disappointed: - Oh NO, not another one! - You see, at this time I found
my observation of the Elysium spot quite interesting and odd, but I was not
happy to see something so similar to it here at approximately the same place on
the Martian disk. In fact, I saw it as a kind of refutation of my theory of the
first spot having anything to do with Elysium Mons and now considered the
possibility of some strange Sun-Earth-Mars-geometry being at work here, that
would tend to make a bright spot in this place on the disk no matter what the
underlying topography or meteorological conditions were like. For I had connected
the first spot with the Elysium Mons volcano, but this second time (on Nov. 28)
I was fairly sure that there was no volcano in that place that could account
for the new spot! - I do not like to think of myself as dumb or ignorant of
Martian geography, but to me, Ascraeus Mons is
"something just a bit north of the equator" and hence not something I
would expect to find so relatively close to the north point of the disk. I
simply hadn't taken the heavy southerly tilt of the Nov. 28 Mars into account!
- So, in a really disappointed mood, I continued with my observations on Nov.
28, and when I saw the "Ascraeus spot" once
more in one of the other filters (either W 58, 15 or 80 A), I did not bother to
take notes about this, as I thought that it was enough to record the general
visibility of the larger bright area surrounding the spot in this filter -
after all, I had already drawn the spot as I had seen it in W 47. - Only later,
after the observation, when I consulted my Mars globe and discovered that the
new spot could in fact very well be connected with another volcano, namely Ascraeus Mons, did I realize how stupid it was of me not to
have recorded in which other color filter the spot
had been visible; for it was already too late, I simply couldn't remember.
I just thought that you should know
the story behind my (seemingly) curiously nonchalant attitude towards note-taking
on Nov. 28. - Thank you for editing my observing notes for this day before
uploading them to the CMO website! I couldn't help smiling when I realized that
the sentence: "...but I did not take notes of this (stupid!)" had
disappeared. It was a nice touch, although basically, I'm quite willing to
admit my own stupidity when it occurs.
Thank you for the grids of the
Martian surfaces of Nov. 19 and 28. It was not easy to use them directly on my
drawings, as my drawings are somewhat smaller than the prints of the grids, but
I tried anyway. The results should therefore not be taken too seriously, but
this much said, I found the spots on my drawings to deviate no more than
approximately 7 degrees in either longitude or latitude from the actual
location of the summits of Elysium Mons and Ascraeus
Mons (with Ascraeus Mons, surprisingly, being the
best fit). At this point I have to add that even though I of course tried to
draw the spots in as precise a position on the disk as possible, the
observations were made through a W 47 filter, which certainly is difficult to
work with, especially with a telescope as small as mine. If I have drawn the spots
just two millimeters off to one side on my report
form, it means a difference of several hundred kilometers
on the actual Martian surface. A scary thought; but I might as well admit that
we're now talking about a degree of precision that I simply do not claim to be
able to achieve (especially not through W 47). All I can say is: I've tried to
do my best, as far as the original drawings are concerned, and the results of
my little experiment with your grids turned out to be more promising than I
myself had expected; I still believe there is a fair chance that the spots I
saw were in fact connected with Elysium and Ascraeus
Mons in some way or another. But as I just said - my experimenting with the
grids should not be taken too seriously, as the grids do not fit the drawings,
so I had to "interpolate" a bit.
Oh, Masatsugu, I'm sorry that this
e-mail ended up being so long. But now at least I am satisfied that you have
got all the information concerning these spots that there is to get, and I'm
glad you asked me those few questions about them. If anyone had asked me these
same questions a couple of months from now, I might have forgotten the details,
but as it is now, I know that everything I have related to you in this letter
is true.
I shall get back to you in not too
long, when I send you my December drawings. I've managed to make 7 observations
so far this month. Unfortunately, I have not succeeded in seeing the December
regional dust storm at all; Mars has been teasing me, it seems, with the dust
always being "just around the corner" of the disk, but never on the
side facing me.
Now let me finish by once again
wishing you a very happy New Year.
Yours sincerely,
P.S. Neither the Japanese nor the
Europeans seem to have much luck with their Mars probes these days. Not that I
believe this to be the reason for its failure, but don't you think the Beagle
2, with its landing site in Isidis Planitia, could have been dangerously close to the dust
core in northern Hellas? - E.
® . . . . . . . .Date:
Thu, 1 Jan 2004 15:53:42 +0100
Subject: Happy
New Year - New drawings coming
Dear Masatsugu,
Happy
New Year!
I hope you received my rather long
e-mail which was an answer to your nice "Season's Greetings"?
I shall post my December drawings to
you either today or tomorrow, so please look out for them. I managed to observe
8 evenings in all in December. These observations might be my last from this
apparition, as Wayne, Mira and I will be leaving for a (long!) trip to
Thank you for nice correspondence in
2003, and please receive my very best wishes for 2004 to you and your family.
Yours sincerely
® . . . . . . . .Date:
Fri, 2 Jan 2004 16:59:15 +0100
Subject: Happy
Birthday
Dear Masatsugu,
Thank you for the quick reply (it
was just so nice to know that the LO-O-ONG e-mail had reached you). And thank
you even more for taking your time to reply on your birthday! I hope you spent
a very nice and relaxed day with your family. (I suspect I am just one day too
late now for wishing you happy birthday on the day itself, but I'm going to do
it anyway: happy birthday!!.) Do people also give each
other birthday presents in
Yes, we expect to come down to nice
summer weather in
Thank you for everything in
connection with the 2003 Mars apparition so far. I just have a TINY hope that
I'll be able to add a few February observations before closing down for this
time, but as I already mentioned to you, chances of that are somewhat slim.
Take care. All the best wishes from
Elisabeth
SIEGEL (Malling,
