Mars At Closest Approach

Yep, there it is!

(Click to embiggenate!)

Looking very bright, very red. Beautiful, along with Venus (which set about an our after sunset), Jupiter (still up fairly high and bright), Saturn (about halfway between Mars and Jupiter), and the moon (rising an hour or so after Mars tonight).

This was the biggie tonight, the closest Mars will be to Earth in decades! If you missed it, if it was cloudy, if you just had to work, well…

…it will all (except for the moon) look about 99.99% EXACTLY THE SAME tomorrow night. And the night after that, and the night after that, and the night after that…

So if you missed it, if it was cloudy, if you just had to work, then go look tomorrow, or next week, or whenever it’s clear and you’re free. The moon’s position in the sky moves significantly from night to night (28 days to go all the way from full to new back to full, so 360°/28 = 12.8° a day, or roughly 1/14th of the distance from horizon to horizon per day) but while the planets move, it’s really rare for them to move very quickly.

Enjoy. Take the time to find someone like me with a telescope and ask nice if they can take a look. Get even a decent pair of binoculars to see Mars’ disk and the Galilean moons of Jupiter.

Don’t do clickbait. Ignore the websites that say “TODAY!” is the day like Mars suddenly appears out of a dark sky for 24 hours and then vanishes.

T’ain’t so. Be smarter than clickbait. Spread the word!