Stargazers will be able to spot a rare occurrence in the night skies this week – Mars playing hide and seek with the Moon.
Sometime in the early hours of Thursday morning (December 8), Mars will disappear completely behind the moon, an event known as an occultation. This happens once every 14 years, so miss it and you’ll need to wait until 2036 to catch it again.
You can expect to see the moon start to come close to Mars at around 4.30am. To know what to watch out for, you’ll notice a peculiar bright orange light in the sky, which is the result of a near-perfect alignment of the Sun, Earth, Moon and Mars.
