Mars. What does the name conjure up? The Red Planet. Martians. Little Green Men. The Martian. The War of the Worlds. Canals even. There have even been stories that Mars is a jinxed planet, that mysteriously destroys every spacecraft we send to it. Actually, only first of these, the Red Planet, is really true, and even then Mars is more of a ochre or pale orange than red.
The fact is that Mars has been photographed, explored, prodded and driven over than any other body in the Solar System apart from Earth. You can find out more about the myths in this video. But during National Astronomy Week 2025 Mars is up there in the sky shining down on us, and you can view it for yourself just by looking up on a clear night. It colour is really obvious, and it’s closer now than it will be for a couple of years, so take a good look, even if you don’t have a telescope.
Mars is the only planet that in any way resembles Earth, which is why it holds such a fascination for us. Venus is the same size as Earth, but conditions there couldn’t be more different. But a glance out of the porthole of the spaceship on which humans may land in the not too distant future will show a landscape eerily similar to an arid desert on Earth, with a pale sky rather than a black one, winds, clouds and even dust storms.
Mars comes close to Earth only every two years, and most of the time is so distant that it’s just a speck in the sky. So astronomers like to make the most of it when they can. It’s now getting smaller all the time as Earth moves away from it although it will be visible for several months to come.
If you’ve been following our Chasing the Moon pages you’ll have seen that the Moon has been getting closer to Mars in the sky every night of the Week. And on Sunday 9 February the two are very close together, which is an unusual sight. The farther north in Britain you are, the closer they are, until in the extreme north of Scotland the Moon actually goes in front of Mars. In telescopes it will be possible to view Mars and the Moon in the same field of view, and with a high magnification you can see the disc of Mars close to the craters of the Moon, giving a very graphic view of the scale of the nearby Moon compared with the larger but much more distant Mars.
For people along a very narrow track in northern Scotland the Moon’s southerly edge will just graze Mars, which will appear and disappear behind lunar mountains – a dramatic view lasting only minutes at about 7 pm, the exact moment depending on your location. Here is a track where the graze will be seen. You would need to be within a few hundred metres of this line to see the effect.
Fun facts about Mars
The supposed martian canals were nothing more than an optical illusion seen only by visual observers straining to see detail on the planet. No photographs of the planet have ever shown them. (Modern style is that the adjective referring to Mars is martian, while a supposed inhabitant of Mars is a Martian.)
The dark features on Mars change slightly from year to year thanks to wind-blown dust.
A day on Mars lasts 24h 40m – very close to that of Earth. From Earth, the same features appear on Mars every 24h 37m, so it takes a couple of weeks to see all the features on Mars if you observe at the same time each night.
Mars has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are probably asteroids that strayed too close to the planet and were captured in orbit around it. Phobos is 22 km across and Deimos is less than 13 km across.
The moons of Mars have been photographed crossing the disc of the Sun as seen from Mars lander spacecraft.
