Close Encounter With the Red Planet

Sometime in the middle of last summer I made a note on my calendar for today--"Mars close, go look". When I saw the note earlier this week, I was a little fuzzy on the details, but thankfully I had left myself a link to fill in the gaps. You see, Mars is closer to Earth this weekend than it will be for the next 13 years. 43.1 million miles away, to be exact. It's usually 140 million miles away, so that's quite a difference. Even to our unaided eyes it was very bright and more red than usual. We got out the camera and tried to take a few pictures, and despite some technical difficulties with the tripod we had a few turn out fairly well.


This was taken with our digital camera set to a 30 second exposure. Mars is the bright dot (in case you weren't sure).