Three years ago on March 20, in southeastern Pennsylvania, an amateur astronomer named Wayne Jaeschke turned his telescope to the skies and captured something strange. There was some sort of blob or serpentine vapor-trail emanating from the surface of Mars. Not knowing what else to call it, he named the phenomenon in a subsequent blog post: “a martian stumper.” “At first I thought: Maybe there’s a pixel error in the live feed on my computer, or some dust has collected on a [telescope] sensor,” he told Popular Mechanics. He soon told other amateur astronomers to check his work. Were they seeing what he was seeing? Eighteen did, confirming this wasn’t some trick. There really was an ethereal plume swirling off Mars’s southern hemisphere. It wasn’t long before the experts picked up the scent and tried to figure out what the oddity could be. Was it a cloud? Or perhaps aurora like the Earth’s own? Read more http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...me-on-the-surface-of-mars-no-one-can-explain/
