Mars in Taurus
You can spot Mars
in the evening sky tonight.
Now home to the
Perseverance rover,
the Red Planet
is presently wandering through the constellation Taurus, close on the sky to
the Seven Sisters or Pleiades star cluster.
In fact
this deep, widefield view
of the region
captures Mars near its closest conjunction to the Pleiades on March 3.
Below center, Mars is the bright yellowish celestial beacon only about 3
degrees from the pretty blue star cluster.
Competing with Mars in color and brightness,
Aldebaran
is the alpha star of Taurus.
The red giant star is toward the lower left edge of the frame,
a foreground star along the line-of-sight to the more
distant Hyades star cluster.
Otherwise too faint
for your eye to see, the dark, dusty nebulae
lie along the edge of the massive Perseus molecular cloud, with
the striking reddish glow of NGC 1499, the California Nebula, at the
upper right.