44 AUSTRALIAN SKY & TELESCOPE July 2018
UNDER THE STARS by Fred SchaafAll my Mars at once
The author shares a lifetime of encounters with the Red Planet.
W
hen I was young the title of
a science fiction story that
I hadn’t even read caught
my attention: ‘All the Last Wars at
Once’. Now, with Mars closer to
us than at any other time in the 32
years between 2003 and 2035, I’d like
to share a concentrated account of
memorable Mars moments — mostly
observational — from my lifetime. Like
mine, your sights of mighty Mars this
winter will be grounded in whatever
past experiences you’ve had with this
most fascinating of our Solar System’s
planets, the world most like Earth.
My earliest Mars. I can’t recall the
very first time I knowingly saw Mars, but
it was probably before I was 8 years old.
Carl Sagan said he was 8 when he stared
imploringly at what he thought (but
wasn’t sure) was Mars. “Imploringly”
because he was hoping to be mystically
transported to Mars by wishing for
it like John Carter did in Edgar Rice
Burroughs’s early 20th-century tales of
adventures on the Red Planet. I probably
didn’t read the John Carter books until
I was a few years older. But actually my
earliest encounter with Mars happened
when I was about minus-5 or minus-6
months old. My mother always told
me she remembered how often and
intensely she found herself watching
Mars in that season of a near-perihelic
opposition of the planet when she was
pregnant with me.
Mars and stars. This column is called
‘Under the Stars,’ so it seems appropriate
to mention a few connections of Mars
and stars that make the stars involved all
the more wonderful.
Mars spends most of its time far
enough from Earth for it to be outshone
by close to 30 of the brightest stars. But
then it remarkably kindles, doubling
in brightness in mere months, until,
in a month such as July 2018, it burnsalmost five magnitudes brighter, greatly
outshining even Sirius.
The star most famously connected
with Mars is, of course, the red giant
Antares, whose name means ‘rival
of Mars’ — rival in colour. Back in
February, Mars passed fairly near
Antares at similar brightness. But
the perihelic oppositions of Mars
typically occur when Mars has moved
on to glow like a burning coal in the
largely dim zodiac constellations of
Capricornus or Aquarius.
Mars, Mebsuta and me. Mars has
a special connection with a much
dimmer star: The planet periodically
has very close conjunctions with
magnitude-3.1 Epsilon (ε) Geminorum,
the star also known as Mebsuta. But
back in April 1976 the transparency
was excellent and seeing good enough
for something much better: Mars’
spectacular occultation of Mebsuta.
A friend of mine who was (and still
is) a gifted telescopic observer saw the
star briefly twinkle through the thinMartian atmosphere.
Another person who observed the
Mebsuta occultation was a 14-year-old.
He had read about the upcoming event
in the weekly newspaper column I had
started with the coming of Comet West
the previous month. (To this day I am still
writing that column, though now every
other week.) This bright young person
contacted me about his observation, and
we eventually met, observed together,
and went on to become very close friends.
Sadly, he died last summer after a long
fight with cancer.
In the next issue I’ll take an inside
look at Martian lore, Viking at Mars,
very special daytime observations of
Mars, and the greatest meetings of
Mars with other planets — including
the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars at
their best that happens only once every
143 years.Contributing Editor FRED SCHAAF is
the author of 13 books, including The
Brightest Stars.Mars and the Moon shine in evening twilight.