Posted on 07/31/2018 2:41:41 PM PDT by ETL
Who discovered Mars? That's a trick question: Because the planet is visible to the naked eye, humans have been watching our rusty neighbor for thousands of years, and there's no way to track down the name of the long-dead observer who first noticed its reddish glow.
But just because we'll never be able to give that sharp-eyed human a name doesn't mean there's nothing interesting to learn about the history of observing Mars.
That said, they didn't know what Mars was — it was just a bright light that didn't behave in quite the same way as the other bright lights did. "These [planets] of course never were regarded, as they are now, as their own separate worlds," Anthony Aveni, who studies ancient astronomy in Central and South America and who retired last year as a professor at Colgate University, told Space.com.
Early observers of Mars also prioritized different types of observations of the planet than we do today. Modern astronomers focus on the sidereal year, the time it takes Mars to orbit the sun — about 687 days. But for centuries, Aveni said, that wasn't the number sky-minded people associated with Mars. "They recognize periodicities and movements that we don't pay any attention to," he said.
For Mars, that meant people prioritized 780 days, the average length of the cycle that Mars shows in the sky. The planet appears and disappears in the night sky, sometimes slipping into the sunlit sky and becoming invisible. If you watched from appearance to appearance, or from disappearance to disappearance, a cycle would last about 780 days, the synodic period of the planet. "It's about how Mars relates to you personally, how it relates to our culture," Aveni said. "It's not about how long it rotates, whether it has life."
Aveni primarily studies the Maya, and he said that most of what we know about how they watched Mars comes from just one book, called the Dresden Codex. The text includes a table of observations that scholars know must be of Mars because of the 780-day cycle.
The book also includes a drawing of what scholars refer to as the "Mars Beast," which Aveni described as a macaw-like creature with a nose like an elephant's trunk. He added that the planet's orbit, which carries Mars across the whole sky, shaped the traits associated with it. "He's more of a watchdog or a guardian of the entire landscape," Aveni said.
Other cultures looking to the sky, Aveni said, were more interested in how the different planets interacted than in any individual planet's journeys. For example, he points to Chinese astronomers, who were fascinated by planetary conjunctions.
One Aboriginal Australian communitysaw Mars as one of four wives following the moon; another saw Mars and Venus as the two eyes of a celestial being. Although few traditions about Mars survive, astronomers focusing on Australia have evidence that Aboriginal peoples across the region tracked it and the other planets carefully for millennia.
And, of course, the Greeks and Romans traced the movements of Mars and other celestial bodies across the sky. They associated the Red Planet with their god of war (Mars to the Romans; Ares to the Greeks), giving us the Mars we know today.
I laughed when scrolled down and saw that.
An interesting thing is that Mars was named after the god of war because of its blood red color. The irony is that the same thing which makes our blood red is also what makes mars red: iron. Iron in our hemoglobin, and iron oxide in Martian soil.
"Yeah, there I was, 4 o'clock in the morning,
alone on Mount Palomar with my eye pressed against the eyepiece ..."
Yes, Mars is basically made up of basalt, a very common rock here on earth. Most ocean floor is comprised of it.
They didn’t say “Uranus”, they said Mars...
You’re all wrong . . . it was Brian Williams
Oh God if only that was true. “Sorry Hillary, but wow we suddenly found out there’s no more room for you on the ship. Have a nice day.”
I thought it was named after a candy bar...
I know the ancient Greeks called the planets they could see, Wanderers” because unlike stars they changed positions.
Of the naked-eye planets, Mars goes through the largest changes in brightness. Right now, it is as big and bright as it gets. At other times of Its and earth’s year it fades to being barely visible unlike Jupiter, Saturn and Venus or Mercury for that matter. I’ve read some say that’s why it’s named for Mars, the god of war. Besides it’s red hue, like war, it is sometimes close and noticeable and sometimes dim and far away. Anyhow get out and see it over the next week or so.
One problem if you are looking at it through a telescope is that because Mars’s day length is nearly the same as earth’s, you see pretty much the same side of Mars every night.
Lol! That’s what I was thinking when I posted the Peter Jennings pic
Always got those two mixed up.
Columbus.
"I remember it like it was yesterday. Pitch black skies over Mt Everest, under heavy machine gun fire.
Suddenly I look up and there it was, this very tiny red dot in the sky..."
"Sure, I have a moment to tell you how and when I discovered Mars..."
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