Looks great Reggie. Trust Windows to cause compatibility problems! Are you sure those are polar caps? I saw the southern polar region with my ST80 a few nights ago and it was really bright, in fact it looked just like a polar cap. I was sceptical though and when I checked my software it showed that it was the Aonia Terra region with no visible cap.



I even used blue filters which help bring out polar regions. It looked so much like the south polar cap. Usually the polar caps are easier to see several weeks after opposition.

 

Yeah, what I saw looked just like a polar cap too. It just shows how bright Mars is this year. Hopefully we'll see a great opposition.

 

Polar-Cap here. In 2003 I saw both. In the Sirius Optics 2003 Mars filter, bright like two cotton-balls.

 

Wow @Orion25, that's another good one full of surface details. And you have quite a bit of blue atmosphere too (could this be CA? perhaps not because I remember that color from my 2016 visual observation with my Newtonian very well)

Surface details are amazing too.

All right another success!

I like the barlowed version the most

 

Indeed to the Dust chilling it's sails. Otherwise - we'll have to become meteorologists for a time! But I refuse to be discouraged by a lousy breeze on Mars and have my thunder silenced! I'm going to Mars whether that damn Red-Orb likes it or not!

 

This is from VPA set for June the 10th 08:40 British Summer Time, which corresponds to Reggie's local time (03:40). Taking different latitude into account and rotating the image slightly in GIMP, the albedo feature Hellas Planitia would be the most likely candidate for the southern polar cap.



I don't want to rain on anyone's parade but I'm not convinced that the bright albedo features in Reggie's photo's are actually the polar caps. They aren't usually visible until several weeks after opposition anyway. What I saw seemed way too big to be a polar cap.



This is from CDC at the same time. If they are the polar caps in the picture it meant that I saw the southern polar cap. The Martian year is 1.88 Earth years and Mars is tilted at about 25° which gives it seasons similar to ours. This would make it winter in the southern hemisphere on Mars. The southern Martian polar cap is much smaller than the northern cap. I believe it can be seen in the CDC image above as a small white feature on the southern polar axis. This does not represent the large white feature I saw and in Reggie's photo. As it is actually summer in the northern hemisphere I doubt the large white feature is actually the northern polar cap. I could be wrong about this but it is difficult to explain the excessive white feature I saw and what's in Reggie's pictures. It could be an atmospheric effect, possibly due to any dust storm activity. Last opposition I only saw the northern cap several weeks after opposition which was 22/5/16 IIRC.



I made this (inverted) CDC screenshot above at the time.



This is from the 5th of July 2016. The white feature at the bottom right of the above (inverted) image is the northern polar cap. This corresponds closely to what I actually observed.

 

Last opposition I was determined to get a butcher's hook at the polar caps. I was primarily using my 130mm Newtonian and got used to being able to determine what part of the surface I was looking at. Observing Mars with a backyard telescope is rather akin to looking at the Full Moon unaided. You can make out surface feature shapes but they aren't always that distinct.

http://www.ap-i.net/avp/en/start

https://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/start

I discovered that Cartes du Ciel and the Virtual Planet Atlas helped hugely with recognising Martian features. I think I used Celestron SkyPortal as well as I didn't have SkySafari then. SkyPortal uses SkySafari's rendering engine and is very similar (both are coded by the Canadian company Simulation Curriculum who also distribute Starry Night 7 I believe). I also realised that the Martian day was a similar duration to ours and that if you observe at roughly the same time every night you can see the same features on Mars, although eventually they appear to drift with successive nights. The surface features you will actually be able see on Mars depends a lot on your geographical location and time zone. Many albedo features can appear like polar caps on Mars apparently. The best time to see the caps is a few weeks after opposition proper. I am not sure why, but they are easier to perceive then. When I viewed Mars the other night with my ST80 I was a bit gobsmacked to actually see any detail at all to be honest. The southern polar region was not unlike your picture, but I could see slightly more definition. For a few seconds I thought I was seeing the polar cap as well! I have no explanation as to why Mars is this bright. My guess would be a combination of it being closer this year and possibly dust clouds high in the atmosphere. It looked impressive though lol.