Saturday, November 10, 2007

Cosmic Illusion: Mars to Move Backward

We're now coming into the home stretch of the last good apparition of Mars until 2016. Now blazing in the late-evening east-northeast sky like an eye-catching yellowish-orange "star," Mars is less than six weeks away from its closest approach to Earth during this apparition.

At the beginning of the year, the red planet was 221 million miles (356 million kilometers) from Earth. This week, it will be 63 million miles (102 million kilometers) away and it now shines some 10 times brighter than it did on New Year's Day.

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/071109-ns-marsreverse.html

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