It seemed so safe and tranquil.

[neufer]

• One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night. Coming home, a party of excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing music. There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the people went to bed. From the railway station in the distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. My wife pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the sky. It seemed so safe and tranquil.

[b][color=#0000FF]Mars at opposition in Leo this weekend. The map shows the view facing east around 7 o'clock local time. Maps Created with Stellarium[/color][/b]

---

Mars shines brightest this weekend
Posted on March 2, 2012 by astrobob

<<If Mars has been catching your attention lately, it’s because the planet is now the brightest it’s been in nearly two years. Easy to see in the eastern sky, Mars comes to opposition tomorrow, rising at sunset and remaining visible the entire night. We look out in one direction to see Mars (east) and in exactly the opposite direction to face the sun. You can literally feel these two opposing worlds by stepping outside during evening twilight. As the sunset glow fades in the southwest, Mars lifts its red face in the opposite corner of the sky.

Because the two planets are together on the same side of the sun, they’re also closest. Mars is nearest Earth on the 5th at a distance of 67.7 million miles. Its average distance is nearly three times farther. The current close approach means that the planet is nearly as bright as Sirius and shows a larger than normal disk through a telescope. That’s good news for Mars lovers, who are passionate followers of the planet’s wispy clouds, shrinking north polar cap and occasional dust storms.

As oppositions go, this is one of the most distant. If both planets’ orbits were perfect circles, oppositions would all be equally close, but because Mars’ orbit is more elliptical than Earth’s, the distance between the two planets varies at each opposition. The 2012 opposition is called aphelic (ap-HEE-lik) because Mars is near its greatest distance from the sun at the same time it lines up with Earth. During a perihelic opposition, Mars is closest to the sun and hence closer to the Earth.

The difference between oppositions can be dramatic. During the last perihelic one in August 2003, Mars was 34.6 million miles away, nearly twice as close as it will be this weekend. Back then it shone brighter than Jupiter with a disk that spanned 25 arc seconds compared to this season’s 13.9 seconds. Mars goes through a complete cycle of close to far oppositions every 15.8 years. Tomorrow’s opposition is nearly identical to the one in 1995. The next perihelic approach will be July 27, 2018.

With the naked eye, you can enjoy the bright, fiery red-orange color of the planet and watch as it moves west in retrograde motion toward Leo’s brightest star Regulus. A small telescope will show vague dark markings and the tiny north polar cap. It’s late spring in Mars’ northern hemisphere and the cap has been shrinking rapidly the past few weeks as the sun’s heat causes it to vaporize. Meanwhile, the southern polar cap, tipped over the limb and currently not visible, has been expanding during the Marian fall. The cap grows under a vast hood of clouds called the South Polar Hood that keen-eyed observers can see as a pale arc along the planet’s southern edge.>>

• Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary falling star. Albin described it as leaving a greenish streak behind it that glowed for some seconds. Denning, our greatest authority on meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was about ninety or one hundred miles. It seemed to him that it fell to earth about one hundred miles east of him.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

_Massive Fireball Witnessed Over The UK By Countless Observers_ by Adrian West on March 4, 2012

<<On the evening of March 3rd 2012 at approximately 21:40 GMT, an incredibly bright fireball/bollide was seen over the United kingdom. Many people were outside enjoying a clear evening under the stars, or going about their ordinary business when they spotted the amazingly bright object shooting across the sky. Nearly all of the observations from the public from across much of the country described the object as a very bright fireball traveling from north to south and disappearing low in the sky.

Mike Ridley said, “I was out tonight photographing the global rainbow display at Whitly Bay and saw this bright light hurtling across the sky. I quickly turned the camera to capture it as it flew overhead. With the naked eye I could see it white hot with an orange tail & really low in the sky. I thought it was a massive firework rocket.”

Most accounts give a duration of around 10 to 15 seconds and the fireball showed a bright orange nucleus with a bright green tail. There was some fragmentation as the fireball ploughed through the atmosphere. At present, it is unknown whether any pieces of the object survived and hit Earth’s surface, but there is a high possibility that if it did.>>