People having been turning up in droves at local observatories to view
Mars.
As much as I've enjoyed viewing Mars regularly myself, I can see why the
casual observer might be underwhelmed, and a bit disillusioned with
amateur
astronomy. In retrospect, circumstances permitting, I think people should
also be treated to a side-serving a nice globular, open cluster, double,
filtered nebula, and optional galaxy or moon view.

I'm sure I will end up responding to this but here goes.

First - my background. I am new to owning a scope but have looked through
several of my friends scopes many times over the years. Finally scraped
together enough cash to buy a 6" refractor this spring. I have seen
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and several DSO's over the years. Jupiter and
Saturn were excellent the first times I saw them. The DSO's (andromeda,
clusters, various nebs, etc) where excellent - although I admit to being a
"little" surprised by just how faint they were in a scope. Uranus was a
small spot in the sky but I expected as much. As it turns out - I never had
the chance (or got around to it) to view mars before. I'm not even sure
why. However - this spring (early May?) I finally got the chance with the
new scope to view Mars for the first time.

Now - I never expected anything like what I have seen from the Hubble or
from the satellites we have sent there. I knew what I would see would be
smaller and I would not see much in the way of detail. But I did expect to
see something "bigger". I think I expected to see something about 1/4 - 1/2
the apparent size of Jupiter in the eye piece. Afterall - it IS a heck of a
lot closer than Jupiter and it's not THAT small. So - when I saw something
that was not much bigger than a star I was somewhat underwhelmed.

Yes, yes I could have done my home work and done some calculations to know
what the apparent size of Mars might have been. Didn't think to. Just made
that good ole assumption. Set myself up for it.

On the other hand - come late July - early August - I have been quite
pleased with Mars and the detail that has been available to see. But I can
still agree with someone who is "underwhelmed", that Mars is not what you
might expect to see and could be disappointing. My only real point here is
that I do not think it is unreasonable to expect that someone who is NOT
that familiar with looking at the planets through a plane ole scope to be
disappointed with some of these things. The media has been feeding people
lines for months that would let them believe otherwise. Nothing in their
other experiences would probably have them think they would not be seeing
"more".

I think it may be more unreasonable to expect everyone to be awed by what
they see. Part of what I have enjoyed about all of this has been the
challenge of finding some things, the satisfaction of being patient enough
to pick out that very subtle detail from what I am looking at. Most of the
people I know that have scopes feel in a similar way I believe. Why on
earth would you expect the average person to walk up spend 30 seconds
looking through the eye piece get the same appreciation?

What I have tried to do on my side walk is to give people some idea of what
they might see before looking through the eye piece as well as tell them
some other facts about Mars. None of the people that I talked to were "too"
dismayed when they looked through as I think they already had some idea of
what they were going to see.

In short - I think you got a perfectly normal reaction

Glenn