Mars is red.

No, I mean really, really red. For some reason tonight it looked like a tiny round fire engine up in the sky. It wasn't a little spot with a hint of orange or red, or yellowish-red - it was RED. Like the Terminator's eye after he cuts the humanoid eye out with a scalpel.

Why was it so red? I have no idea. But if tomorrow night is anything like tonight, look somewhere between the south and southeast, fairly low on the horizon at about 11:30 or midnight (directly on the opposite side of the sky from Orion if your internal compass doesn't work too well), and believe me, you'll have no trouble finding it. It's the really red dot.

Speaking of Orion, if you look down a way and a bit left of the belt, outside the four main stars that make the his shoulders and knees, you'll see a really bright star that's a bit bluish, but more bright white than anything. You might even mistake it for a planet. I'm looking this star up right now to see which one it is - at first I thought it might be Jupiter given the brightness, but it was the wrong color (Jupiter is yellowish), and more tellingly, it twinkled. Stars twinkle, planets don't.

I'm pretty sure the star I'm seeing is Sirius, because a) I know Sirius is bluish-white, being about twice as massive as the sun and an amazing 22 times more luminous were you to view the two side-by-side from the same distance. It's usually the brightest star in the sky besides the sun, the only things brighter being the moon, Venus, and sometimes Mars and Jupiter; and b) I know Sirius is in the vicinity of Orion because of the myth of Orion the hunter and his dog Sirius (hence its nickname, "the dog star." In fact, the more I think about the position it was in the more certain I am it is in fact Sirius and not some other giant like Algol, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Arcturus, or Deneb, all of which are in the wrong part of the sky and are of a different hue.

I'm embarrassed to admit that despite knowing a great deal about cosmology and astrophysics from a theoretical standpoint - how and why stars form, their journey in time along the "main sequence," and their ultimate fate, which depends solely upon their mass (white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole), and despite understanding in fairly profound terms the way the Universe as a whole has expanded from a singularity - the Big Bang - to its evolution into the myriad of galaxy clusters and superclusters, each galaxy itself swarming with billions of suns and untold numbers of planets orbiting those suns, and how dark matter and supermassive black holes combine to gravitationally sculpt galaxies into spirals and ellipses, and even how a mysterious force known as dark energy, applied by astronomers for lack of a better term, seems over cosmic distances to act as a sort of antigravity - a repulsive force which is actually speeding up the expansion of the Universe and may ultimately rip apart the fabric of spacetime and atoms themselves until all that's left is a soup of different 'flavored' quarks, which may or may not then condense back into a singularity and trigger a new Big Bang; despite all this, I'm actually a rather poor observational astronomer. I struggle with anything beyond the basic dozen or so constellations and the five naked-eye planets and a few globular clusters and conspicuous nebulae, such as M31 (our neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy). I have friends who are much more practically knowledgeable about the night sky, and can tell you the name of nearly everything you ask about, but lack insight (or interest) into why and how that sky got to be the way it is.

I liken it to people who collect beetles or butterflies or keep a birdwatching checklist - people who are compelled just to "collect" and show off their knowledge of nomenclature and maybe even some cladistics, but without any deeper understanding into the mechanistic operation of evolution via natural selection, driven by genes, which has brought about these objects of their affection. They just want to collect and be an expert in an esoteric field, like the 'naturalists' and 'antiquarians' of years past, without bothering to construct and rationalize for themselves a synthesis of the ideas and processes operating behind the curtain, so to speak, which brings all these amazing things we see around us into being. I've always been more interested in the fundamental theories than being able to identify a star for someone who asks me about it, though I'd be pleased as punch to have that kind of knowledge too. But that's encyclopedic knowledge, and I don't have a particular gift for it. I'm ok, average. But it's always bored me to just memorize star patterns, or the binomial latin names of animals, or common names of garden trees and plants. I don't dismiss the need for names for all these things, an orderly system for constructing family trees, and people who know those conceptual trees' branches and twigs intimately. It takes all sorts, right? My interests and talents just lie in the more fundamental processes that create those trees in the first place; again, in the hows and whys rather than the what.

That being said, I do have a few astronomical tidbits to offer you. My mom and I noticed the other day that the crescent moon and Venus just after sunset were very close together, reminiscent of the Turkish flag. I know that the French word "croissant" literally means "crescent" (which makes sense looking at the baked item it describes), but that these were invented and named only after Romanian, Hungarian, French, and other European forces halted the advanced of the Ottoman Turks under Suleyman the Great, and thus the spreading of Islam, into Europe via a series of extremely bloody battles during which unspeakable atrocities were committed by both sides. The legend of Dracula ties into this period, as do other tales, but it's somewhat ironic that the modern Turkish flag features the crescent moon and Venus emblem, when supposedly that particular astronomical configuration was present in the sky on the night when their forces were finally routed in battle by a determined though uneasy alliance of Christian fiefdoms. Perhaps it's all just a tale made up by the victors, and the flag was already formed long before, and the French simply mocked their defeat by baking crescent-shaped bread rolls. Who knows.

But if you want to see Venus and the crescent moon together (though at the moment, Venus is actually below the moon, somewhat ruining the effect), these next couple days are your last chance until sometime in 2010.

Also, I've heard that Saturn will be more prominent than usual this year, especially in March, though I don't know any details on why that will be - whether it's because Saturn will be at perihelion (its closest approach to the sun) or simply on the same side of the Sun as the Earth during that time, making it appear closer and brighter. I'll have to read up on that. Lastly, to my eyes the Pleiades seem brighter than usual when the moon is new or not yet risen... I can plainly see six of the seven "sisters" with just my eyes, and with a moderate pair of binoculars I counted no less than thirteen daughters of Atlas the other night in that open star cluster in Taurus, something which the Greeks who named them would be quite puzzled to know!

Anyway, that's my attempt at an astronomy report for the evening. I hope you get out under a dark sky and look at all those tiny balls of burning gas and realize that it's not some pretty backdrop or Hollywood effect - that those stars and planets and satellites are really there, and that amazingly over such immensely vast distances you can actually look and see them directly with your own eyes, without the aid of any technology to abstract the matter. I still trip out when I realize this, even when staring at the moon and realizing it's this giant sphere actually right out there in the sky, falling around the earth, reflecting sunlight, and that people from this planet have walked around on it. That, to me, is astounding. Who needs fiction when the natural world is so full of wonder?