For the past several months, Mars has been dawdling very low
in the east-southeast sky and mired deep in the dawn twilight, making it
difficult to see.
Finally, the red planet
is beginning to brighten up.
In the coming weeks Mars will be gaining altitude while
progressing into a darker part of the sky. Currently, it's rising south of east
about two hours before sunup. It hangs nearly motionless above the
east-southeastern horizon as seen at dawn all month, while the faint stars of
Aquarius slide behind Mars and toward its upper right. Through a telescope,
first magnitude Mars is disappointingly tiny.
Getting better
The best views we can get of Mars come when the Earth
overtakes the slower-moving Mars in their respective orbits. That also usually
occurs within a few days of the two planets making their closest approach to
each other and in our sky Mars appears directly opposite to the Sun in the
sky--rising at sunset, appearing highest in the sky around midnight, and setting
at sunrise.
Astronomers refer to this as "opposition," but the
next opposition for Mars is still a very long way off (Christmas Eve to be
exact) so it's going a while before it will appear large enough for a
telescopic view to be worthwhile. Mars will actually reach its closest point to
the Earth--54,783,381 miles (88,146,460 kilometers)--about a week earlier, on
Dec. 18.
Right now, Mars is still rather far: about 163 million miles
(262 million kilometers) away. But by late December, it will be glowing more
than four times brighter, at magnitude -1.6. That's a bit brighter than Sirius,
the brightest
star in the sky.
Don't be fooled
Now for something a bit different: just about this time of
year over the past three years, people start receiving an e-mail titled "Mars
Spectacular," which has circulated widely on the Internet from an
anonymous source. In turn, this message has ended up being passed along to
others who simply couldn't resist forwarding it to their entire address book; a
snowball rolling down a hill is a good analogy.
This e-mail declares that on Aug. 27, Mars will be closer to
Earth than it has in the past 60,000 years, thereby offering spectacular views
of the Red Planet. The commentary even proclaims, with liberal use of
exclamation marks, that Mars will appear as bright as (or as large as) the full
Moon.
The problem is that "Aug. 27" actually refers to
Aug. 27, 2003. Mars did indeed make a historically
close pass by Earth that night. But, to the naked eye Mars merely appeared
like a brilliant yellowish-orange star, certainly not anything like the full
Moon.
So this Mars e-mail is completely bogus. Yet it now seems
that every year in the late spring or summer, it gets revived.
Now I would like to make a request: If in the coming days
and weeks you find yourself a recipient of this Mars e-mail message, I would
suggest that rather than forward it on to others, you simply hit the "Delete"
button on your computer keyboard; better yet, why not forward the article you're
reading now to the person who may have passed the e-mail on to you. In this
way, you'll be providing an antidote to this Mars computer virus.
Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other
publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.
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