So...did you witness this rare celestial sight of the full moon and a fiery Mars last night? I stepped out of the house last evening at about 11pm into a bright, moonlit night to take some photographs. The moon was just above my rooftop while the Red Planet was the tiny dot above and to the left of the moon. Mars will not look so large or luminous again until 2016.
Mars is so prominent in the night sky because it is in opposition, which means it is directly opposite to the sun from Earth's point of view. Hence, just like the full moon, we are seeing the planet's surface totally bathed in the sunlight. This happens every 26 months but what's special about last night was that Mars is just about 64 million kilometres from us. That's about as close as Earth and Mars will ever get in our lifetime.
While I was photographing this rare sight, I also trained my camera on the moon itself. Looks impressive, right? The secret is, I cheated. I used the camera's 4x digital zoom on top of its 12x optical zoom to get this close-up image. But yes, while you can see many details, the sharpness of using a digital zoom is very much less than impressive.
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