Damn. Just as Mars gets close enough for me to see something with my 6 inch reflector telescope, a massive dust storm hits. I was out there this morning at 0430 local. Mars was bright and red in the southern sky, but when I got it in the telescope's field of view it was like looking at a red version of Venus -- just the disk, with no surface features visible. The before-and-after pictures above (taken with far better equipment than mine) shows the extent to which the dust has obscured things on Mars.
But Sky and Telescope reports that the Martian skies may soon be clearing. Hooray!
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