I finally found time to process the data from this session. The steadily shrinking red planet shows a bit of clouds on the morning limb and a faint, bright patch that might be a dust-related event near the Sinus Meridiani. The IR channel showed some brightness there, lending support to the earlier reports of a possible dust event at this location.
Mars is now very far away and, thus, very small. At about 125,000,000 miles (or about double the distance it was back in March), Mars is now about exactly half the size it was then, too.
Conditions were good for this session, however, allowing for this image before Mars finally drops into the sunset. Some clouds are seen near the morning limb over Eden and a small rift is present in the dark ring around the very small North Polar Cap. The Hellas basin, to the south, is covered in a bright haze.
We had some fair seeing for Mars this week. Here’s an image from the 29th taken shortly after sunset showing Elysium just risen past the terminator and the Lemuria region traversing the CM.
