Mars Looms Big And Bright As It Swings Close To Earth
October 19, 2005
Look east late these evenings and you'll see a big, fiery yellow "star" shining much brighter than any other. This is the planet Mars, and it's passing unusually close to Earth during late October and early November 2005.
Anyone can see it - no matter how little you know about the stars or how badly light-polluted your sky may be.
During mid- to late October, look for Mars glaring low in the east after 8 p. m. local daylight-saving time. In November, it's there in view as early as 6 p.m. standard time. Later in the evening, Mars climbs higher into better view and shifts over to the southeast. There's nothing else nearly as bright that you can confuse it with.
Mars will be its closest to Earth on the night of October 29 - passing 43.1 million miles (69.4 million kilometers) from our planet around 11:25 p.m. on the 29th Eastern Daylight Time. However, Mars will look just about as big and brilliant for a couple of weeks before and after that date.
Mars is at opposition (opposite the Sun in our sky) on November 7th. This means it rises at sunset, is up all night, and sets at sunrise.
This is the nearest that Mars has come since its record-breaking close approach in August 2003. At that time it passed by at a distance of only 34. 7 million miles (55.8 million kilometers), the closest it had come in nearly 60,000 years. But for amateur telescope users, now is still a very special time.
The planet will reach an apparent diameter of 20.2 arcseconds (the angular size of a penny seen at a distance of 620 feet), offering an usually detailed view of its surface. That compares with 25.1 arcseconds in August 2003 (the angular size of a penny at 500 feet), and only 15.9 arcseconds at Mars's next swing-by, in December 2007 (a penny at 800 feet).
In fact, not until the summer of 2018 will Mars again come as close to Earth as it is right now (this statement remains true until mid-November).
Moreover, this year skywatchers at the latitudes of North America and Europe have a big advantage they didn't have in 2003. That year Mars was far south in the sky and never got very high for telescope users at mid-northern latitudes. But this time Mars is farther north and rises higher during the night, affording a sharper, cleaner view in a telescope through Earth's blurry atmosphere.
Telescope Tips
Good as this fall's showing is, surface details on Mars are always a pretty tough target in a telescope. To begin with, Mars is only about half the size of Earth. Even at its closest, under high magnification it will appear as only a surprisingly small, bright ball with some subtle dark markings, possible white clouds around its edges, and perhaps a tiny remnant of the white South Polar Cap shrunken in the warmth of the Martian summer.
The brightest yellow areas are deserts covered by fine, windblown dust. The darker markings are terrain displaying more areas of bare rock or darker sand and dust. Mars rotates in a little more than 24 hours, so you can see it turning in just an hour or two of watching.
To see much detail on Mars, several things all have to be working in your favor. You'll need at least a moderately large telescope with high-quality optics. (For the lowdown on how to select a telescope wisely, see Sky & Telescope's article "Choosing Your First Telescope," located on our Web site at
http://SkyandTeles … le_241_1.asp)
And you'll need to wait until Mars rises high in the sky, well above the thick, murky layers of Earth's atmosphere near the horizon.
Moreover, the atmospheric "seeing" must be good. This is the astronomer's term for the constant fuzzing and shimmering of highly magnified telescopic images due to the tiny heat waves that are always rippling through the atmosphere. The seeing changes from night to night and sometimes from moment to moment.
Copyright 2005 by Space Daily, Distributed United Press International
-
STAR TRAK for February 2012
Feb 02, 2012 |
5 / 5 (1) |
0
-
Asteroid to make closest approach since 1975
Jan 30, 2012 |
4.8 / 5 (4) |
5
-
Loss of planetary tilt could doom alien life
Jan 12, 2012 |
4.4 / 5 (13) |
15
-
A wealth of habitable planets in the Milky Way
Jan 11, 2012 |
4.8 / 5 (29) |
102
-
STAR TRAK for January 2012
Jan 05, 2012 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Engineers build first sub-10-nm carbon nanotube transistor
Feb 01, 2012 |
4.9 / 5 (31) |
30
-
Something old, something new: Evolution and the structural divergence of duplicate genes
Jan 31, 2012 |
4.6 / 5 (7) |
1
-
The hidden nanoworld of ice crystals: Revealing the dynamic behavior of quasi-liquid layers
Jan 30, 2012 |
5 / 5 (3) |
1
-
Stock market network reveals investor clustering
Jan 27, 2012 |
3.9 / 5 (23) |
8
-
Of microchemistry and molecules: Electronic microfluidic device synthesizes biocompatible probes
Jan 26, 2012 |
5 / 5 (1) |
0
More news stories
Europe stakes billion-dollar bet on new rocket
A pencil-slim rocket is scheduled to lift into space from South America on Monday, carrying a billion-dollar bet that Europe can grab a juicy slice of the market to place satellites in low orbit.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
5 hours ago |
3.5 / 5 (2) |
0
NASA sees wide-eyed cyclone Jasmine
Cyclone Jasmine's eye has opened wider on NASA satellite imagery, as it moves through the Southern Pacific Ocean.
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
21 hours ago |
3.5 / 5 (2) |
2
NASA sees Giovanna reach cyclone strength, threaten Madagascar
Tropical Storm 12S built up steam and became a cyclone on February 10, 2012 as NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead. Residents of east-central Madagascar should prepare for this cyclone to make landfall ...
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
21 hours ago |
not rated yet |
0
Political leaders play key role in how worried Americans are by climate change: study
More than extreme weather events and the work of scientists, it is national political leaders who influence how much Americans worry about the threat of climate change, new research finds.
Feb 06, 2012 |
5 / 5 (6) |
68
Humans may have helped the decline of African rainforests 3000 years ago
(PhysOrg.com) -- Large areas of rainforests in Central Africa mysteriously disappeared over three thousand years ago, to be replaced by savannas. The prevailing theory has been that the cause was a change ...
Walney offshore wind farm is world's biggest (for now)
(PhysOrg.com) -- The Walney wind farm on the Irish Sea--characterized by high tides, waves and windy weather--officially opened this week. The farm is treated in the press as a very big deal as the Walney ...
GPS court ruling leaves US phone tracking unclear
A US Supreme Court decision requiring a warrant to place a GPS device on the car of a criminal suspect leaves unresolved the bigger issue of police tracking using mobile phones, legal experts say.
Europeans protest controversial Internet pact
Tens of thousands of people marched in protests in more than a dozen European cities Saturday against a controversial anti-online piracy pact that critics say could curtail Internet freedom.
Study finds that anti-diabetic medication can prevent the long-term effects of maternal obesity
In a study to be presented today at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting, in Dallas, Texas, researchers will report findings that show that short therapy with the anti-diabetic medication ...
Anonymous briefly knocks CIA website offline (Update 2)
The website of the Central Intelligence Agency was briefly inaccessible on Friday after the hacker group Anonymous claimed to have knocked it offline.
Netflix settlement trims 14 pct off 4Q earnings
(AP) -- Netflix pressed the rewind button on its fourth-quarter earnings after settling allegations that the video subscription service violated a consumer-privacy law.