The Mars Email

MARS The Red Planet is about to be spectacular in August of 2009! This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the Last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again. The encounter will culminate on August 27th 2009 when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August 2009 it will rise in the east at 10 PM and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m. By the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30a.m. That's pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month. Share this with your children and grandchildren. NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN

First this week I’d like to clear something up, I’ve had a few people who’ve ask me about an email that’s been going around about a close encounter with Mars on the 27th of August this year, when Mars will be as close as 34 million miles, and will look as big as the full moon. Well it’s a hoax, at the moment we’re chasing Mars around the Sun, its on the other side at the moment, and a long way away about 250,000,000 miles, which is why its so dim in the dawn sky, we’ll lap it on the 19th of October when it will be only 43,000,000 miles away, it could get as close as 34,000,00 mikes though, if the earth were at its furthest from the sun and Mars was at its closest and in opposition.

The email, tells us that Mars will look as large as the full moon, and ends with “no one alive will ever see this again”, it should be there’ll be no one alive to see anything again. For Mars to be that big it would have to be less than a million miles away, and if it didn’t collide with us, which it almost certainly would, we’d have massive tides, and our orbit would savagely adjusted further out or perhaps further in, which would give us an Indian summer that no one would know about. So it just a pretty harmless joke. It’s a rehash of a real event, another encounter with Mars, six years ago, on August 27, 2003. That was the closest in recorded history, by a whisker, and millions of people watched as the distance between Mars and Earth shrunk to 35 million miles. This October’s encounter, at 43 million miles, is similar. To casual observers, Mars will seem about as bright and beautiful in 2009 as it was in 2003. But sadly there’ll be nobody to see it because we have an asteroid the size of Australia due to hit 4 miles north of Bude early on Sunday morning.

Well it was nice to have something else to talk about, because not much has changed since last week, though it starting to. At last Jupiter is moving up and away from the dawn sky; soon after midnight on Friday, look to the lower left of the waning Moon in the east for Jupiter on the rise, as shown above. They both stand high in the southeast by dawn.

Mercury is both faint and buried deep in the glow of sunrise, very far lower left of Venus, and not worth the effort.
Venus still outshines all the opposition due east during dawn. In a telescope Venus appears about half lit. It's
A very dim Mars in Aries has closed to within only about 4° to Venus's left. But it's 160 times fainter! But as you just heard we’re chasing it and it will improve over the next couple of months
Saturn in Leo is now in the southwest at dusk. It moves lower to the west later in the evening, and pretty soon we’ll lose it altogether, but a much brighter Jupiter will replace it.
Uranus (magnitude 5.9, in Pisces) is between Venus and Jupiter before dawn, but it’s very dim.
Of course all this presupposes at least clear sky’s and I have to say I’m cautiously pessimistic about getting one, that’s the trouble with having sub tropical climate, sometimes the sub takes over.