Mars Looms Big & Bright as It Nears Record-Breaking Close Approach(Forwarded)

Sky & Telescope
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Contact:
Marcy L. Dill, Marketing Director
617-864-7360 x143,

Press Release: August 5, 2003

Mars Looms Big & Bright as It Nears Record-Breaking Close Approach

Late in August the planet Mars -- the most Earthlike world known beyond our own
-- will pass closer to Earth than it has done in nearly 60,000 years.

Already Mars is blazing big, bright, and fiery yellow-orange in the late-evening
sky. You can't miss it. For all of August and September, Mars shines many times
brighter than the brightest star in the summer sky. Anyone can see it, no matter
how little you know about the stars or how badly light-polluted your sky may be.

In early to mid-August, look for Mars glaring like a bright orange star in the
southeastern sky after about 10 or 11 p.m. (local daylight-saving time); in late
August after about 9 or 10 p.m.; and in September or later, after twilight
fades. Later in the night Mars climbs higher in the sky and shifts over to the
south.

Mars will be at its closest to Earth on the night of August 26-27. It will pass
34,646,418 miles (55,758,006 kilometers) from our planet (measured center to
center) at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on the 27th. However, Mars will look
just about as brilliant for at least a week or two before and after that date.

There has been some confusion over exactly how much of a record this Mars
passage is setting. Roger Sinnott, a senior editor of Sky & Telescope magazine,
got to the bottom of the matter, finding 57,617 BC to be the correct date of the
last Mars passage that came so close. That was 59,619 years ago (taking into
account that there was no "year zero" between 1 BC and AD 1). For the full
story, see the Sky & Telescope article "A Mars Record for the Ages" in the
magazine's June issue, page 94, and also available online,
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing...icle_970_1.asp

We won't have to wait as long for the next passage of Mars that will be so
close. Mark your calendar for August 28, 2287.

However, for all practical purposes in terms of how Mars will look, it came
nearly as close in 1988. That year it reached an apparent diameter of 23.8
arcseconds as seen in a telescope; this year it will top out at 25.1 arcseconds
wide (the angular size of a penny seen at a distance of 500 feet). And Mars will
make another good pass by Earth in October 2005, appearing 20.2 arcseconds wide.

Telescope Tips

As the world awakens to this year's Mars event, writes Daniel M. Troiani in the
June Sky & Telescope, "a rush not seen since the 1986 visit of Halley's Comet
could overwhelm the telescope market. The event is almost a certainty to fire
the public's imagination as few other astronomical events can."

However, Mars is always a pretty tough target in a telescope. To begin with,
it's 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
the bright white South Polar Cap shrinking in the warmth of the Martian late
spring. The brightest yellow areas visible on Mars are deserts covered by fine,
windblown dust. The dark markings are terrain displaying more areas of bare rock
or darker dust. Mars rotates every 24½ 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 "Choosing Your First
Telescope", http://skyandtelescope.com/howto/sco...icle_241_1.asp .) And
you'll need to wait until Mars rises high in the sky, well above the thick,
murky layers of atmosphere that hug the horizon. And 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 minute to minute.

More about Mars and its unusual close approach is in the June, July, and August
issues of Sky & Telescope and online in Observing Celestial Objects Planets
[http://skyandtelescope.com/observing/objects/planets/].

Note to Editors/Producers: This release is accompanied by publication-quality
graphics and a broadcast-quality animation; see details on page 2. For more
movies and animations, or to arrange for an interview with one of Sky &
Telescope's Mars experts, please contact Marcy Dill.

Graphics and an Animation

Sky & Telescope is making two illustrations, one photograph, and one animation
available to editors and producers. Permission is granted for one-time,
nonexclusive use in print and broadcast media, as long as appropriate credits
(as noted in each caption) are included. Web publication must include a link to
SkyandTelescope.com. Also available are broadcast-quality movies and animations
showing Mars as seen in a backyard telescope and rotating on its axis to display
its various surface features; television producers should contact Marcy Dill at
617-864-7360 x143 or .

Note: The best pictures of Mars by professional astronomers have been obtained
from Earth orbit using the Hubble Space Telescope. Here are links to the finest
images from 1999 and 2001, the last two times the red planet was well placed for
observations:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/1999/27/

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/2001/31/

Related Articles:

* Mars at Its All-Time Finest
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing...icle_985_1.asp
* A Mars Record for the Ages
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing...icle_970_1.asp
* Mars in 2003: Which Side Is Visible?
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing...icle_997_1.asp
* The Martian Moons in 2003
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing...cle_1004_1.asp