Mars is biggest and brightest
As Mars lines up with Earth on the same side of the Sun, it is at its biggest and brightest.
Every 26 months the pair take up this line up, moving close together before then diverging again on their separate orbit around our star.
Tuesday night 13th October sees the actual moment of what astronomers call “opposition”, as three bodies will be in a straight line at 23:20 GMT (0:20 BST).
A separation sign of 62, 069, 57km, or 38, 568, 243 miles which is the narrowest gap now until 2035. At the last opposition, in 2018, Earth and Mars were just 58m km apart, which makes this occasion rather special for astrophotographers using their 14-inch Celestron telescope in the Northern Hemisphere as Mars’s elevation in the sky is higher which means telescopes don’t have to look through quite so much of the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere which distorts images.
In 2003, Mars made its closest approach to Earth around opposition in nearly 60,000 years a separation of just 56 million km.
The distance between the two at opposition can be over 100 million km, as happened in 2012.
The variation is a consequence of the elliptical shape of the orbits of both Mars and Earth.