Mars at its most visible in Earth's summer sky

Mars will make its closest approach to Earth in at least 50,000 years this summer, dazzling stargazers with a reddish light as bright as giant Jupiter and revealing elusive surface details to observers with access to even modest telescopes.

The new year also promises two total eclipses of the moon, the first visible in parts of the United States in more than three years.

This summer, the gears of the heavens will bring the Red Planet to within 35 million miles of Earth.

One amateur astronomer, George Varros of Mount Airy, Md., plans to hunt down and photograph polar caps, surface features and hints of Martian weather in the clouds that form around Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system.

"The good thing about Mars is it's usually a long apparition," staying big and bright all summer long this year, he says. "It's pretty cool."

The year's first lunar eclipse will begin just after 10 p.m. EDT, May 15.

Total eclipses of the moon occur when the moon passes through the circular shadow that the Earth casts into space, and it is fully shaded from direct sunlight.

If skies are clear, observers will see the sunlit moon slowly engulfed and dimmed by the shadow's darkness.

Totality will last 53 minutes, from 11:14 p.m. until 12:06 a.m. EDT, with the moon's face turned an eerie, coppery color. The hue is produced by sunlight, filtered, reddened and scattered by the rim of the Earth's atmosphere.

The second eclipse will occur on Saturday Nov. 8.