cosmicpursuits.com

GA7O1 TIL Percival Lowell studied planets through the 24 inch Clark telescope and announced his discovery of canals and oases on Mars in 1894, which no other astronomers saw. Lowell used this telescope for the rest of his life and sketched Venus, despite the fact that it has no visible surface features
b9Ek0 TIL Mars only gets close enough to Earth to give up much detail just once every 780 days. It’s the only planet to reveal an appreciable amount of surface detail in a small telescope, and it also features occasional surprises such as dust storms and local fogs and cloud banks
1akrD TIL During early days of telescopic observation, the light regions on Mars were thought to be continents, so they were given names that described land masses. On a night of bad seeing without steady air, Mars is a boiling orange blob