Prepare for an encounter with Mars this month

All who remember the movies of the ’50s will tell of being so frightened – scrunching deep in our seats and hiding our faces – of Mars, of wars with Mars, of encounters with green Martians, of nightmares when spaceships would zap people from their backyards and take hostages to the red planet.

Those science fiction movies scared us to the point of throwing up our Milk Duds. It was an era when extraterrestrial creatures were feared, UFO sightings were sensationalized, and Lord Tennyson’s lines filled us with terror:

“This world was once a fluid haze of light, Till toward the centre set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast The planets: then the monster, then the man.”

Shakespeare didn’t help the image of life beyond Earth. In “Hamlet,” he twice referred to the mysterious planet: “Thou art the Mars of malcontents,” and described “an eye like Mars to threaten and command.”

Monsters, that’s what any intelligent life form from Mars had to be: one-eyed, antenna-headed monsters who would one day bring about a war of the worlds.

That was, however, until the softer side of extraterrestrials was depicted in the blockbuster movie “ET.” From then on, we could swallow the popcorn.

Maybe we just grew up. And, we began looking at the night skies with wonder, with imagination, with dreams like those of Jonathan Swift in 1726 when he wrote about the flying island of Laputa from which observations were made of the moons of Mars.

Now, we are more interested in reading from the century-old words of the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: “To step out onto the soil of asteroids, to lift with your hand a stone on the moon … to land on [Martian] satellites and even on the surface of Mars – what could be more extravagant!”

So, we will be looking to the skies all next week, not with the fear or foreboding of childhood but for a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience. The red planet is about to be spectacular, when Mars comes closer to Earth than it will again until 2287.

The encounter – the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history – will reportedly culminate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth. It will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky; it will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification, Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.

That information, of course, is from the Internet. And, although we cannot attest to the accuracy, we’ll be looking for Mars to grow progressively brighter and brighter in the next several days.

A long time ago, in 1986 or so, we stood at the end of a seaside point to watch the spectacular Halley’s Comet fill the Down East skies. Nothing had been so exciting since watching Northern Lights dance overhead.

But to think of seeing Mars this close, well, it’s just something out of this world!