In the night of December 7 to 8, the time has come. Mars will then be at its closest point to Earth for this decade and aligned with the Sun and Earth. The planet is then at its largest and brightest. The perfect opportunity to view Mars with the naked eye. You also get a rare spectacle. The moon will eclipse the planet for an hour. The next time this happens will not be until 2059.
Tonight is the day, then Mars will be in opposition. That means the red planet will be directly opposite the sun with Earth in between. This makes Mars visible almost all night and a lot brighter than usual. The ideal time to look up.
In itself, this phenomenon is not very special since it occurs every 780 days. Although not every opposition is the same. Due to their elliptical orbits, Mars will be closer to Earth one year than the next. The closer the planet gets to Earth, the brighter and larger it will appear in our sky. During this opposition, the planet will approach to within 80 million kilometers. A lot closer than the average distance between Mars and our planet, which is about 225 million kilometers.
Where should I look?
Mars is in the constellation of Taurus and will be at its highest point around midnight. That’s at about 63° above the horizon in the south. Mars is clearly visible to the naked eye as a reddish bright star in the night sky near the full moon. Through binoculars it is a somewhat larger spot. And with a telescope you may see dark and light areas. If you watch a little earlier or later, it is useful to know that it rises in the east around sunset and disappears in the west around sunrise.
The full moon provides an extra rarer spectacle. Because the moon will cover Mars for a while. So we get a lunar eclipse of the red planet during an opposition. The last time this happened was in 2007 and the next time will have to wait until 2059. If you want to see this, look at the full moon at 6 am. It will slide in front of Mars and make the planet disappear from view for an hour. The planet reappears around 7am.
The weather is not good, though. Tonight and tonight there are winter showers and it is often heavily cloudy. All clarifications are possible. They can even be wide, especially in the northwest.
Don’t panic if you don’t get to see Mars tonight. The planet is also clearly visible in the period around the opposition. Before that is in the late night and early morning, after that earlier in the evening and early night.
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