Earth and Mars will be closer than they have been in ten years on Monday.
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Griffith Observatory will be closed Monday, but you can visit the facility’s large telescope anytime after 7 p.m. on days it’s open to get a closer look at Mars. It will be the brightest “star” that you’ll see in the southeastern sky and it will appear a bit reddish. The best time to see it is around 1am. Also worth noting is that Saturn will be nearby, to the right of Mars.
Though you won’t be able to see much detail with the naked eye, a good pair of binoculars and especially a telescope can be enough to make out some detail on the planet’s surface.
However, because the ellipses are tilted, the distance between the two planets as they approach one another will still vary.
This planetary drive by is the culmination of a phenomenon called Mars Opposition, in which the Earth lines up directly between Mars and the Sun every two years or so.
The last close encounter of this type was in August 2003, when Mars was 35 million miles from Earth, the closest the two planets had been in nearly 60,000 years. Saturn will reach its own opposition with Earth on June 3, when it will be 840 million miles from here. That happens when Mars and Earth come nearest to each other in their orbits around the sun, something that happens about every 26 months.
Also, both CNN partners Astronomy and Sky & Telescope.com offer online tools to help you track what’s going on in the night sky.
As NASA explains, because of the elliptical nature of the orbits of Earth and Mars, as well as the gravitational pull of other nearby planets, the shape of their orbits is constantly in flux. During the period between Mars’ closest and furthest points, the Red Planet’s size changes sevenfold from the perspective of Earthbound observers, Slooh officials said in the statement.
Because Mars is so unusually close, astronomers are getting uniquely clear and detailed images from telescopes like Hubble.
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You’ll find Saturn along the same path that the sun and Moon travel across the sky; look generally eastward after nightfall.
