(Jun 22, 2018 07:34 PM)Yazata Wrote: Thought Mars was all some shade of red? Check this out. (I think that the color difference is enhanced.)
Percival Lowell had some "enhanced" polar-cap encounters with blue (and blue-green areas elsewhere) via his telescope. But of the psychological optical illusion variety.
On the 3d of June, 1894, therefore, it was about May 1 on the southern hemisphere of Mars. On May 1, then, Martian time, the cap was already in rapid process of melting; and the speed with which it proceeded to dwindle showed that hundreds of square miles of it were disappearing daily. As it melted, a dark band appeared surrounding it on all sides. [...] For it is, as we shall shortly see, a most significant phenomenon. In the first place, it was the darkest marking upon the disk, and was of a blue color. It was of different widths at different longitudes, and was especially pronounced in tint where it was widest, notably in two spots where it expanded into great bays [...] The former of these was very striking for its color, a deep blue, like some other-world grotto of Capri. The band was bounded on the north, that is, on the side toward the equator, by the bluish-green areas of the disk. [...] That the blue was water at the edge of the melting snow seems unquestionable. That it was the color of water; that it so persistently bordered the melting snow; and that it subsequently vanished, are three facts mutually confirmatory to this deduction. [...] we see that several independent phenomena all agree to show that the blue-green regions of Mars are not water, but, generally at least, areas of vegetation; from which it follows that Mars is very badly off for water, and that the planet is dependent on the melting of its polar snows for practically its whole supply. --Chap03_Water, from MARS, by Percival Lowell, 1895
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Jun 22, 2018 07:34 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 22, 2018 09:25 PM by Yazata.)
![[Image: ESP_053894_2295.jpg]](https://static.uahirise.org/images/2018/details/cut/ESP_053894_2295.jpg)
