Currently, if you look towards the east three hours after sunset, you will see a bright pinkish-white star like object rising... this is the planet Mars. Mars will line up with the Earth and the Sun on the night of March 3rd (which is called an opposition). Mars will be nearly as bright as the brightest nighttime star Sirius which can be found to the right of Mars (see graphic below). Mars is currently in retrograde motion; meaning, it is moving east to west among the stars. Mars started the retrograde motion on January 25, 2012. Mars retrograde motion will cease on April 16th and again move west to east. Notice how Mars makes a loop in the sky. An analogy of this phenomenon can be compared to when you are passing a car: as you move past the car, in the same direction, the car looks like it is moving backwards to you... relatively speaking! Now to make things even more interesting, Mars does not make its closest approach to Earth until March 5th. You would think that since Mars is in opposition on March 3rd, then the closest approach would be on the same day... not! Celestial mechanics can be a mind blower at times! But Mars was the planet that helped past astronomers in determining how planets moved among the stars. For untold centuries, that looping motion of Mars (as seen above) really through ancient astronomers for a ...

(I photographed Mars retrograding among the stars back in 1988. I began taking the picture early in the morning in July of that year and finished up on it early in the evening in December. That picture was multiple exposures on one frame of film which you can read about in an article I wrote for Sky & Telescope magazine at the time by clicking the 1988 above.)

Carl Sagan had a show on PBS called Cosmos. In Episode 3-The Harmony of the Worlds, Sagan shows how astronomy and astrology went their separate ways with Johannes Kepler leading the way in the 17th century. Sagan's show dramatizes the trials and tribulations of Kepler trying to understand how planets moved, and over a period of decades, triumphantly came up with the three laws of planetary motion. Mars motion among the stars plus Tycho Brahe's observations of the red planet played heavily in his findings.

Since we are on the topic of Mars and Carl Sagan, check out this episode Episode 5-Blues for a Red Planet. Disney is releasing, on March 9th, coincidently, a movie about a fictional Mars adventurer named John Carter which is based on the novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs who by the way was the creator of Tarzan. Sagan touches on Burroughs fictional works plus others, and then gives us the cold, hard facts about what Mars is really like.