Mars Makes Closet Approach In More Than A Dozen Years
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MIAMI (CBSMiami) - You won't have to be in a planetarium to see the celestial show Friday night.
Mars will be brighter and bigger to the naked eye.
"If you look southeast," explained Dr. Jorge Perez-Gallego from the Frost Planetarium, "you're going to be seeing the moon and that bright spot next to the moon is actually Mars. If you want to see Mars just look toward the moon and a little bit down and you'll see the beautiful sight of Mars tonight.
Dr. Perez-Gallego explained the Red Planet, Earth's closest neighbor, is going to be closer than it's been in 15 years giving us a great show.
"The average distance between Mars and Earth is about 140 million miles. It's going to be a little under 40 million miles to earth tonight," he said.
Our galactic neighbor is getting a lot of attention lately after the recent discovery of water on the planet.
If you use a telescope, you can get even a better view, but either way it shouldn't be hard to miss moving from the southeastern sky to the southwestern.
"It's definitely brighter than usual, way brighter than usual," Dr. Perez-Gallego said, "and it's going to be a slightly reddish, just like a notch of reddish on it."
That's not the only show in the heavens. There was also a total lunar eclipse, the longest of the 21st century, which lasted an hour and 43 minutes. Unfortunately, we weren't able to see it on this side of the world.
"The people that are in East Europe, the Middle East, they're going to enjoy this like really dark blood reddish moon as the eclipse takes place," Dr. Perez-Gallego said.
If clouds get in the way of your Mars viewing tonight, you can scan the skies for days to come, the red planet will remain close for a while. Peak viewing is July 31st at 4 am.