What does mars look like

Rapidly moving clouds suggest the passage of time, and the shift from a warm and wet to a cold and dry climate is shown as the animation progresses.

The lakes dry up, while the atmosphere gradually transitions from Earthlike blue skies to the dusty pink and tan hues seen on Mars today. This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity. TKSST features smarter, more meaningful content than what's usually served up by YouTube's algorithms, and amplifies the creators who make that content. Curated, kid-friendly, independently-published.

You would see two moons in that sky instead of one, and there would be a lot less interference from satellites. On the downside, twilight lasts longer on Mars because of all the extra light-scattering dust in the air.

That same dusty atmosphere will also reduce the brightness and visibility of the stars at low altitude, just as low-lying fog does here. Emerging from the base at dusk, the first thing you would see over the rocky landscape would be a beautiful sunset. On Earth, sunset skies are painted a Turner-esque palette of copper and gold, with the Sun looking like a bloated orange ball.

On Mars, thanks to the dusty atmosphere, you would see a sunset dyed purple and blue, with the faraway Sun reduced to a shrunken blue coin before it set behind the extinct volcanoes silhouetted on the horizon. If Earth was showing a full or gibbous phase , through your telescope you would clearly see its familiar green continents and blue oceans on the dayside, and the lights of its cities glinting on the nightside. And just imagine what an incredible sight a crescent Earth would be through your highest-powered eyepiece.

Mars is so close to Earth that none of the stars would look any brighter or fainter than they do from Earth. As there is no shift in parallax to rearrange the constellations into new shapes, you would still see Cassiopeia, Orion the Hunter, and all your other favourites. Read our guides to the best winter constellations and the best summer constellations.

Native-born Martians of the future will almost certainly re-draw the night sky to celebrate their own history and key figures. Our Moon crawls relatively slowly across the heavens. Both Martian moons would shine brightly enough to cast your shadow on the rocks and dust dunes around, as you watched them drift overhead. Planet-spotting on Mars would be great fun. Although Mercury and Venus would be fainter than they appear from Earth, Jupiter and Saturn would sometimes appear much brighter.

When the two gas giants were at their closest to Mars both would show fascinating detail through your telescope. The reason Mars is nicknamed as the Red Planet is that it is covered with dust on most of its surface. Also, the bright rust colour of Mars is derived from the iron-rich minerals in its regolith as well. If we compare this to Earth, the soil on Earth is regolith too, but it is loaded with organic content as well.

According to NASA, the iron minerals are responsible for oxidisation or rusting which causes the soil to look red. But, dust storms are rarely common on the Red Planet, as the wind blows the red dust. And because Mars is one-sixth the size of Earth, large storms sometimes cover the whole planet. Like Earth, Mars also has Polar Caps. They appear, like finely layered stacks of water ice and dust that extend from the poles to latitudes of about 80 degrees in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

NASA reports suggest that these polar caps were probably deposited by the atmosphere over long spans of time. These polar ice caps remain frozen year-round. Here are five striking pictures of the red planet.