We’ve been looking at a lot of cloud bottoms lately. Today they’re about to drop water on us, and I’m hoping they’ll clear up before tonight so I can look at Mars. But what do you do when you’re rained out and still want to enjoy some astronomy?

I like to read astronomy books. There is a stack of them in my office, waiting to be read. Things with titles like “Handbook of Infrared Astronomy” because I always wanted to understand how IR folks do their thing. There’s also Deep-Sky Wonders” — a book I edited for Sky Publishing, back when I was a books and products editor. Actually amateur observer Steve O’Meara was the first editor on the book, which is a compilation of the best and coolest columns by long-time Sky & Telescope columnist Walter Scott Houston. It came across my desk for final editing and fact checking and I spent many months poring over the words before they went to press. Then for about a year I couldn’t bear to look at the book because I was too close to it. Now, more recently though, I’ve been taking it down off the shelf and reading about starhopping from the Big Dipper or galaxy hunting in Corona Borealis, or other such little goodies that are forever enshrined in the book. It’s good armchair astronomy, especially when the cloud bottoms get to be too much.

Occasionally I get off on a science fiction jag, reading back issues of Analog or Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine to pass the time. Or, if I’m really bored, there’s also Web surfing for cool astronomy pictures!

But if you’re not into reading or Web surfing is getting old, what else can you do? Some folks have the full Cosmos TV series, first broadcast on public television in the early 1980s. That’s a great one to watch, particularly if you’re faced with a string of foggy, cloudy nights. You learn a lot from Carl Sagan’s exploration of the universe in that series, and it does keep you going until the next sucker hole in the clouds opens up and welcomes you back to an evening of stargazing!

What is it about stargazing that draws so many fruitloops out of the closet? I’ve often wondered this while scanning the sky looking for my favorite objects. There’s something so intrinsically beautiful about the stars and planets. They’re just there being stars and planets. Most stars shine by consuming hydrogen fuel in their cores and venting the energy generated as light. Planets reflect the light of the Sun, and they orbit the Sun in predictable paths.
So, why is it these predictable, physical motions and activities draw out what a friend of mine often refers to as the “psychoceramics” experts? (translation: crackpots) I’ll be darned if I know for sure, but my guess is that there’s an innate human need for the mysterious — and since the stars and planets can’t be touched (easily), they’re good candidates for fuzzy applications of the mysterious and arcane.
Take Mars, for example. It orbits the Sun every 687 days, almost but not quite twice as long as it takes Earth to go once around the Sun. Both planets go round and round, like two kids on a merry-go-round. One planetary kid is on the inner circle, the other is on an outer circle. Every 17 years or so, the two planets end up near each other in their orbits; Mars looks big and bright in our sky, and if somebody on Mars could see us (and Earth wasn’t lost in the glare of the Sun), we’d look pretty bright and big in their sky, too. This is an entirely predictable, natural consequence of planets in orbit around a star.
This summer a huge number of amateur astronomers (and a bunch of professionals, too!) are aiming their telescopes at Mars and taking this opportunity to study the Red Planet in detail. They’re all quite dedicated to the scientific study of the planet and they’re capable of turning out some amazing work. One of the best is Don Parker — a member of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (and one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met). His images regularly grace the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (ALPO) site.

Now, the amateur and professional astronomers aren’t the confused types I was referring to in my opening sentence. No, the folks I’m thinking of are whipping themselves into hysteria over this perihelic opposition of Mars (that’s what it’s officially called). And they aren’t likely to be outside actually observing the planet. Why let reality stand in the way of a good fantasy?

My charitable suggestion is that the folks who are invoking Mars as an astrological influence or even worse are ignorant of the physical processes that are at play here in the solar system. My not-so-charitable suggestion is that these people are using the Mars perihelic opposition to make some money, make a name for themselves, and/or go on a little power trip using fake scientific terminology and people’s gullibility to their advantage.
One “PhD” in astrology (no, I’m not mentioning any names (why give him/her free publicity?) is claiming that Mars’s energy signature in one’s horoscope could be causing people to be upset, overworked, suffering from ego-inflation, and engaging in fault-finding of one’s fellow workers or family members this summer. Gosh, do ya really think so???
Of course it HAS to be Mars, rather than, oh say, the recent spate of hot weather in many parts of the world. Nobody would blame personality glitches and short tempers on anything logical when a planet some 55 million kilometers away is a much more convenient source of bad karma. Right? Of course not. That wouldn’t be profitable.
A little word of advice here: astronomy’s a great science. It’s one you can do for yourself. And it’s one you can learn for yourself. You don’t need a mystic guru to read your tea leaves or use psychoceramic powers to interpret the Martian movements for you (all for a fee). Sure, you might need help from a friendly observer or a few finder charts from someplace helpful like SkyandTelescope.com — but they’re just there to help. Not do your thinking for you.
Step out there one of these summer nights around midnight and check out the stars and planets. Mars will be the one shining in the south east (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere), and it’s reddish white! No special tools required to see it!