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Stargazers take heart: Mars gets big and bright next week, as the sun, Earth, and Mars align near a new moon on the night of October 13.
The event that occurs about every two years is called “opposition” in astronomical terms: the sun and Mars on opposite sides of the Earth. From the perspective of Earthlings, according to NASA, Mars rises in the east just as the sun sets in the west, and it would stay in the sky all night, setting in the west just as the sun rises.
Because we’re seeing the entire daytime side of the red planet all week long, it’ll be ideal to see, writes Mikhail Kreslavsky, an assistant planetary research scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in an email to NPR.
And because this year’s opposition is also close to the new moon, Mars will shine brighter without the moonlight in the way, he writes.
The opposition of Mars is related to the “close approach to Mars”, which is the point at which Mars and Earth get closest to each other in their orbits around the sun. That happened on October 6. Therefore, Mars is quite large in size.
“[Usually] for people who are amateur astronomers with a decent-sized telescope, Mars would still look like a dot, “astronomer Derek Demeter told the Are We There Yet? podcast last week.
“Now that we are getting very close to Mars, the apparent size has almost tripled [in the telescope]”said Demeter, who runs the Seminole State College Planetarium.
“I was able to identify surface features that you can never see … where Opportunity landed … all these areas where the rovers landed, where we could go,” he said of his stargazing experience a few days ago. earlier.
The year 2020 has seen its share of Martian exploration launches. The United States launched a six-wheeled Rover called Perseverance; the UAE launched its first mission to Mars, and China launched its Tianwen-1 project to send an orbiter, lander, and rover to the red planet in a single effort, seeking a successful first mission to Mars.
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