Starry Night This Week
Each week most PBS stations air "Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer",
the world's first and only weekly TV series on naked-eye astronomy. The Starry Night images on this page illustrate
the show for the week of Monday August 24, 2009. You can view the complete show script, or watch a RealPlayer video of the show.
How To Find Mars During This Week's Annual Celebration Of Get up early to see what Mars really looks like this August. It can be found near Gemini and Orion in the predawn eastern sky. Venus will be very bright and distracting closer to the horizon.
Mars is about twice as wide as our Moon. That means that in order for it to look as big as the Moon, it would have to be only twice as far away as the Moon -- and it never gets anywhere near that close!
The Great Mars Myth And Misunderstanding