Johnny Christmas asked about an object he saw near the moon on July 17th which was Mars.
It was very cool because it looked like Mars was a moon of the Moon.
If you missed it don't be distraught, because it will happen again tonight Aug. 12 and tomorrow night Aug. 13.
Tonight it will be to the left of the Moon and get closer all night. By tomorrow night it will be to the right of the Moon. So we in the northern hemosshere will not see it's closest approach.
That honor will befall our friends down under.

If you can't make it tonight or tomorrow, I'll give you now the next two dates of close approach between Mars and the Moon.

Sept 7th an 8th, and October 5th and 6th.

I would think that this time and Sept will be the coolest however because those two dates are on either side of Mars's closest opposition to Earth in history.

Enjoy.

Thanks for getting the alert out just in time, Planetwatcher. Brilliant. Transcendental even. Enjoy was the only thing to do.

As it happened I didn't note your post till now, but I did get lucky and happen to walk past a glass door with a gap in the foliage outside at just the right time and angle. In fact I got lucky twice.

The first time Mars was really close to the Moon, low down to the right, both of them sailing through light cloud. Unbelievably beautiful and a little bit awe inspiring too. If Mars is shining through the clouds it must be really close and the number crunchers must be getting the calculations right. It’s great to know we can trust them.

The second time Mars was at the same angle, between four and five on the clock hands system, but a good bit further away, with the sky completely clear. Seeing the Sunlight shine back so brightly from both of them from the same general direction gave an immediate awareness of how fast the left shoulder was hurtling Eastwards and how soon the darkness of the sky would be terminated. It somehow made Mars seem really close and really real, not just a new symbol for an unobtainable goal like the Moon once was, is now again (almost) but neither need be.

Couldn't help thinking that Canadians would soon be looking at the same thing and thinking ‘wow, I could be instrumental in sending some instruments there in 2009. All I have to do is get a few million of my friends to sign the Mars Society Petition. Yes, let's do it.’

Like you say, it looked like Mars was a moon of the Moon. We might have been looking at a similar sight every night (the moon with a moon) if the mid-century folk last century had got things in the right order. Low Earth Orbit base. Low Lunar Orbit base. Lunar base. Mars Orbit base on Phobos or Deimos. Mars settlement. Onward and upward from there. Now that wasn't difficult to work out, was it?

Let's be fair, they did have the aftermath of two world wide wars to cope with and the difficult decision on whether to have Marxist-Leninism or shopping as our preferred way of getting the housekeeping done. It wasn't easy. Still, now all that is history, so all we now have to do is get on with the job in hand.

Everyone should try to have a look at the repeat performance offered up by Planetwatcher on Sept 7th & 8th or Oct 5th & 6th and have a think if that isn't the way to go.

Philip

Afterthought - did anyone get a photograph of Mars and the Moon together? If not it would be great to see what results can be obtained on any of the upcoming dates mentioned by Planetwatcher.

Philip

Phillip;

Thank you for your kind words. I almost didn't get it out in time.
The night before I had been thinking about Johnny Christmas's comments of the July 17th sighting which I saw too. Knowing that the moon goes full circle each month I pondered that if Mars was in the moon's path once, it might be again.

I opened up my Starlocator software, emlinated everything of weaker magnitude then Mars, and started playing with the time settings in 5 day intervals.
Sure enough Moon and Mars conjuncted again, but a few days sooner then it did in July. From there, getting Sept. and Oct. was easy and I thought some of you folks might like to know about it. I would have.

I was just a little disappointed with the Aug. sighting because my part of the country had patchy fog both nights. It was still visible but not as good as it could have been. Also from my vantage point they were quite a bit farther apart then they were in July.

The software showed the closest conjunction at around 8:00 Central Time on the 13th, but also showed them as being closer then they turned out.

But I'll be watching in Sept.

hi..
I found this picture...for those that haven't seen it yet..

UPDATE::
The Sept conjunction between the Moon and Mars will be Sept. 8th and 9th.
Not the 7th and 8th as I stated before.
The closest conjunction will occur around 9:00 AM CDT or 2:00 PM Universal Time (Also know as Zulu time or Grenwich England Time) on the 9th.

Looks like our friends in Asia and down under will get the best view again.

Thanks for the picture, InOrbit.

I hope that the update from Planetwatcher inspired some more of those that have the tools and have the talent to get out there and grab some images. I you did, it would be really good if everybody sent something in for to Fraser to show us in the picture gallery.

Seeing them both in the same field of vision, with Mars so bright and in the pink alongside the silver-gold Moon, has been a great experience, but not one that's easy to record or really to describe adequately. Two places we could so soon go to, if enough of us wanted to enough. How and when and in what order, those are the questions.

Philip