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Earth enjoys Mars close encounter
(CNN) -- Astronomers around the world are looking to the skies as Mars gets as close to Earth as it has been in 60,000 years. The last time Mars was this close our ancestors were occupied with the quest for fire and keeping their stone axes sharp -- and were several millennia away from inventing the wheel. This time, scores of Mars parties have been arranged and telescopes around the world will be pointing to a bright orange-red dot a mere 55.8 million km (34.6 million miles) away. Mars is now the brightest object in the sky after the moon -- and will not be this close again until the year 2287. Observatories from Beijing to Sydney have thrown open their doors for Mars enthusiasts to get a better look. And Mars parties are being held from Nashville in the United States to the deserts around Wadi Rum in Jordan. In Sydney, the harborside observatory was bathed in red light to celebrate the planet's passing as hundreds of people queued up to look through several telescopes set up on the observatory's grounds. "This is only once in a lifetime that I can see another planet. ... It's really great," stargazer Rebecca Horton told Reuters. But not everyone was impressed. "We wanted it a little bit bigger," a young schoolgirl named Victoria told a local radio station after watching Mars with her family from a Sydney beach. The unusually close encounter has come about because of the differing orbits of Earth and Mars around the sun. Earth's orbit is almost circular, while Mars' is more elliptical -- and takes much longer to complete. So the two planets come close together only at certain times. The best place to get a glimpse of the fourth rock from the sun, astronomers say, is in the Southern Hemisphere. Those getting closest to Mars were residents of Tahiti in Polynesia -- the nearest terrestrial point to the red planet as it made its orbital fly-by at 0951 GMT Wednesday. While many around the world may have missed the closest encounter because of daylight or cloud cover, Mars will still be clearly visible to the naked eye at nightfall from everywhere on Earth -- given good weather and not too much light pollution. A telescope or binoculars have even provide a glimpse of Mars' polar ice caps and some of the huge canyons that scar the planet's surface --some deep enough to swallow Mt. Everest with room to spare. And if the weather is poor on Wednesday, fear not -- astronomers say Mars should remain one of the brightest objects in the sky for several weeks yet.
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