Kristina Bergen | Special to the Fitzhugh
Just in time to view Mars at its brightest this fall, a small piece of the Red Planet has found a new home in Jasper Dark Sky Preserve.
The martian meteorite is part of the space rock display at the Jasper Planetarium and making special guest appearances at the SkyTram Star Sessions weekends through October.
Red Planet at its closest
Mars is the fourth rock from the sun, and one of the smallest - only slightly larger than Mercury.
For a pipsqueak planet, Mars has some pretty cool street cred: it's home to the largest volcano on any planet in the solar system - Mount Olympus.
With a telescope you can see the fuzzy white buttons of the Martian ice caps at its poles. And it has the largest canyon in the solar system – the Mariner Valley.
Oh, and it's red, by the way, because it’s rusty. (Or, at least because the iron in its surface layer of soil has oxidized. Which means it's rusty...)
Yup, it's red.
Close and bright
A year on Mars is roughly twice as long as a year on Earth because Mars orbits the sun farther-out than Earth.
When our two planets are on opposite sides of their orbits, we can be nearly half a billion kilometres apart, with the Red Planet showing up only as a hard-to-spot dim star, way off in the distance.
But for a few weeks every two years, Earth ‘catches-up’ to Mars in its orbit, gliding alongside it at a comparatively close 50 million kilometres or so.
When this happens in October 2020, Mars will become a blazing red-orange light twice as bright as Jupiter, easy to spot in the evening sky with the naked eye.
Where to look, what you’ll see
The Red Planet is now bright and fiery red and will be for weeks to come.
To see Mars at its best, look above Signal Mountain (to the southeast from much of the Jasper townsite) just after nightfall.
Mars is out almost all night long now. It is highest in the sky at midnight and can still be seen in the west before dawn lights up the horizon.
And while there may be little aliens running around town collecting candy on Oct 31 (or wishing they could), don’t be fooled – they’re probably not Martians. No guarantees, of course...
Kristina Bergen is manager of strategic initiatives with the Jasper Planetarium. When it arrived, she touched the Mars meteorite… twice.
