Look To the Sky Tonight, You Will Not See This Again for 15 Years

If you love star gazing and staring into space, tonight would be a good night to go out and look up. According to the National Weather Service in Cleveland Ohio, the planet Mars will the closest it will come to the Earth until the year 2035.

If you look into the Eastern sky tonight, look for the bright reddish object, and that would be Mars. Even though Mars will still be 38.6 million miles from Earth, this is the closest it will be for the next 15 years.

And being that this is Binghamton after all, I thought I would check see what WBNG is forecasting in the way of cloud cover tonight. According to WBNG, at 7 p.m. we will have partly cloudy skies. The National Weather Service is saying that Mars will appear in the sky approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes before the moon rises. Once the moon rises and makes the sky brighter, Mars won't look as bright as it did before the moon entered the sky, but you should still be able to pick it out, that is if the clouds aren't too bad.

For optimum viewing, you will want to get as far away from street lights as you possibly can. You should be able to see Mars with the naked eye, but obviously a telescope of binoculars will get you a better view.

If you are unsure of which object in the sky is Mars, or if you're not even sure which way is east, there are a couple of free sky map apps available for you to download in you phone's your app store. My co-worker highly recommends this app.