This is the meanest shark I've ever seen! Look at those wounds on his snout, he must've really wanted to get whatever he was after to take that kind of punishment. [From Circant]
Playing with a toy mars globe I tried to match veiws of the globe to the photographs I took last night. The best match seems to be centered at 150° longitude by -30° latitude as shown in this picture of the globe:
The 'sun' in this simulation, was really a light bulb at 30° to the line of sight in order to achieve the same phase as observed in the photo. That makes it 76 million miles to Mars by trigonometry. A lot of the features from the globe are labeled and I imagine that I can see most of them in the photo.
I haven't checked this against an almanac or ephemeris, so these measurements may be all wrong.
Map notes:
Mars was hiding behind mackerel clouds that rolled in about 2:30.
None-the-less, I took the big telescope to the front porch to get this shot:
This looks like the back side of Mars, from the lack of large dark structures in the middle of the planet. The Planetica shows the planet to be about 80 million miles away, so it'll grow much larger over the summer.
