At opposition this year, Mars will be a mere 55,758,006.4845 kilometres from Earth, the closest approach by the Red Planet since 57617BC when it was even closer at 55,718,001.232 km distant and subtended 25.13 arc seconds rather than this year's 25.1 arc seconds.
Interestingly enough, it seems this earlier opposition did not pass unnoticed, as recent research suggests.
Baron Beavis Von Büttkopf, newly elected Chancellor of the University of Burgerweldt has spent long hours in study of runes insrcibed on thousands of Bison bones discovered in a cave in Germany's Neander valley.
Excavations for road construction had uncovered the cave's entrance, which had been buried by a landslide in prehistoric times, and archeologists had found the inscribed bones along with ritual huminoid burials, stone and bone weapons and artefacts, and the skeletons of 27 Neanderthals of various ages who had been trapped by the landslide.
The Baron says he has found that the runic inscriptions represent a rudimentary form of old Norse, and are concerned mostly with hunting and weather trivia, but claims that several concern notice being taken of the brightening of a moveable star of reddish hue.
Baron Beavis concedes that the reference could be to ANY opposition of Mars, but has directed the University's Faculty of Comparative Comparisons to conduct sophisticated dating techniques to ascertain if the big opposition is the one referred to.
Meanwhile, Astronomical Society of NSW planetary observers are eagerly preparing for the event, and as the Crago Observatory has a first class 16” f/7 Newtonian on a site noted for it's great seeing, have brought in extra equipment.
An Andrew's 2mm eyepiece is being kindly loaned by Richard Jaywalker and this will be teamed with a 3x Barlow to be used on nights of superlative seeing.
While this will yield a magnification of 3,100x, planet fancier Jaywalker admits that the rather limited field of one minute of arc could call for some very precise tracking and for the planet to be examined in detail rather than as a whole.
On a brighter note, he said that Deimos or Phobos could easily fit in the field of view, and that he planned to draw detailed maps of each object.