The Moon and Mars

Tonight (January 29th 2010), the moon is supposed to be the biggest and brightest of all tonight. It is being called the "super moon and the "wolf moon". It is said to appear 30% brighter and 14% larger tonight. It also has a partner- Mars (National Geographic.com).

While in Ada at 7:15pm the sky was crystal clear, not a cloud in the sky. I stopped on my way home to take a look, as well as the moon being beautiful, Mars was super red. I wasn't aware this was Mar until I came home to look online about astronomy. As I pulled into Allendale, the sky was cloudy. =( How does 25 miles make such a large difference!? So I'm glad I stopped in Ada to see the beautiful full moon and Mars nestled in to the left of the full moon. It appeared no bigger than a star but the red color was bright.

According to NatGeo, the moon will be closes to the earth at 4:04am tomorrow morning, I'm tempted to get up and look. Hopefully it will be clear.

I attached a picture which was taken in Allendale at 8:00pm but Mars is not apparent. It didn't show up in the picture from Ada either. If I get up at 4 I'll attempt another picture.

Day One- Finally a clear sky

At 5:09 am today I got up to look at the sky..not willingly of course, but none the less I did. It was crystal clear and BEAUTIFUL! Had it not been for the less than 20 degree weather, I would have stayed out there this the sun diminished the stars appearance. I did not check the conditions for this morning until after the fact, but since it was nice yesterday (1/20), I figured it might be clear. Here are the predicted cloud conditions taken from cleardarksky.com



This morning I saw several constellations including:
The Big Dipper


Cepheus


Draco



I viewed them from a bit of a wooded area so some aspects were covered, but overall I could see perfect.


Constellation pictures taken from Bing Images