In Perihelic Opposition

Well this is some sky watching few days coming up. Mars is going to make a showing as it is in "opposition" which means it is at a close point to the earth as their elliptical orbits go and in its "perihelic" stage which brings Mars' elliptical orbit to the closest point to the sun.  We get the double dose.

The distance will be about 35 million miles - a mere spitting distance as things go - and we have to go back a few thousand years to find that again..that close I mean in "perihelic opposition".

The "perihelic opposition" thing doesn't happen often - this being the 4th in my lifetime and I really remember the first in 1956.  I was a kid in suburban Cincinnati, all caught up in Reds baseball (the only "red" that I had interest in) until one summer evening we had  UFO (flying saucer) flap of sorts and my entire family and the neighborhood saw the thing fly over off to our east.  WLW TV sounded the alert and it was the buzz for a long time after. Mars happened by about that time and all of us made the instant connection.

We were not too far time wise from the first "HG Wells/War of the Worlds" movie (1953) and were pretty sure we were going to be zapped by some spitting ray guy and evaporated. By today's standards of scary this wasn't much but back then, in the farmlands of suburban Ohio with UFOs for the seeing and Mars just a stone's throw away - well you get the picture - 10 year old imaginations run amuck.  I snuck out with my brother to see this movie a couple years before - Main Theater in Dayton Ohio; just down the block and turn left - and my parents were furious..but we were city kids of sorts and this took place in some remote suburb of Los Angeles so unless you have a plowed field around and some hills (we had neither) it seemed like we were pretty safe.

So this week, older and wiser, with no older brothers and neighbors to egg us on, Mars shows its red face a little south of overhead and if it is clear enough, the red planet will actually seem red to our eyes.  We can whisk ourselves back half a century (or more - sigh) to a corn field, a bunch of clowns lying on our backs looking straight up, talking some but not much; as if our chatter would attract something with fingers that had suction cups on their ends; an occasional plane's signal lights scaring us for an instant but mostly just looking and thinking that this was pretty neat.