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Mercury, May/June 1997 Table of Contents

James C. White II
Middle Tennessee State University

Mars, long planet of our nightmares and late planet of our future, goose-steps through our evening skies. Let's meddle in its affairs.

It was a cool night in 1894, and American businessman-turned- astronomer Percival Lowell sat back in his observing chair and relaxed. For the past hour he had been hard at work at his telescope on yet another sketch of the planet Mars, and this one, he told himself, was the best. Why? Because the canals were so distinct.

Seventeen years before, the Red Planet had come unusually close to Earth, giving astronomers an excellent view. The American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered its two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, at that time. But it was Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli who caught the attention of the world in 1877. Schiaparelli said he could make out a network of lines on the martian surface: canali, he called them, meaning "channels" or "groves." English speakers thought he meant canals--for people in the 19th century, a mass engineering feat if ever there were one. The little green man was born.

At the time, Lowell was a well-known Boston businessman with similarly well-known siblings--poet Amy Lowell and Harvard University president Abbott Lawrence Lowell. He became consumed with learning more about Mars and its intelligent canal-building beings. He purchased land for an observatory in the high foothills of Flagstaff, Ariz., gave up his successful business, and headed west. Over the years, Lowell observed and sketched the Red Planet and its canals [see "Seeing Is Believing," p. 24]. And when Mars wasn't visible, he observed Venus and the moons of Jupiter, which he found--what a coincidence!--had canals, too.

Besides being patient, energetic, and deep-pocketed, Lowell was a good writer and public speaker. He got out his message that life existed on Mars. He wasn't talking microbes, either. These Martians were far more advanced than we. Yet they still weren't able to arrest the death of their planet, a sickly 10th the mass of Earth and half again as far from the Sun. Their lakes and seas were drying up, their suburban swimming pools becoming ever more expensive to fill. So, the story went, they dug canals to carry water from the polar ice caps to the arid equatorial regions.

There was only one problem: Most other astronomers just couldn't see the canals, and not for want of trying. "To save my soul I can't believe in the canals as Schiaparelli draws them," said American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard in 1894. By the early 1900s, new, bigger telescopes confirmed that no canals existed. Lowell and his colleagues, in their attempt to study fuzzy views of Mars, had seen structure where there was none [see Echoes of the Past, September/October 1995, p. 35]. It is a case study in how even the most dedicated observers can be misled.

Good or bad, Lowell's work heightened the public's interest in worlds other than our own, so NASA has much to thank him for. And judging from what Martians do to Earth in science fiction, maybe we're better off that Lowell, now entombed in an observatory-shaped mausoleum beside his old observatory, was wrong.

Observing Guidelines

Fetch your trusty telescope, sharpen your colored pencils, and brew a pot of tea. The secret to learning about Mars is to perform careful, ongoing observations. Over the next two months, plan on spending at least one night every week or two with Earth's belligerent little brother. Mars's size in your telescope will not be large, but thankfully it is high in the sky in early evening for all observers.

Summer is advancing in Mars's northern hemisphere, the side that's tipped toward us and the Sun. You can break out the camera for a photographic record, but I think drawings are better. See whether you can identify and draw changes in the northern polar ice cap. Along with the times and dates of your drawings, record your impressions.

Finally, to bring reality to those drawings, attempt to identify the features you've drawn. You can obtain a Mars map at your local bookstore or from the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers. In addition, refer to Sky & Telescope magazine's Mars observing guide in the January 1997 issue.

What to Do With the Observations

Please submit your completed report by July 31, 1997, by regular mail to Jay White, Attn: Guest Observers, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tenn. 37132. The selection committee will evaluate the reports and choose the Guest Observer for a future issue.

JAMES C. WHITE II is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. He confesses to enjoying the scenes of colonial Mars in the film Total Recall.