Skywatchers had a great opportunity to see Mars yesterday in the evening, as the orbits of Mars and Earth briefly aligned, giving the best view of the Red Planet.

Mars looks like an orange star to the naked eye, but it is revealed as a disk with many features in modest telescopes. On average Mars moves closest to the Earth every two years and two months.

Tuesday night marked the very night when Mars stopped coming closer and started moving away from us in its roughly 26-month orbital cycle. The event took place at 6:47 p.m. ET.

Mars came as close as 54.8 million miles this year, not as close as the historic pass-by of 2003, when it was 34.6 million miles away.

"That was when the red planet came closer than it had ever been since the time Neanderthals walked the Earth," said Jaymie Mark Matthews, an astronomer at Canada's University of British Columbia, according to the National Geographic.

The next one closer than that will be in 2016, when Mars will come as 47 million miles away from the Earth. Mars will continue to dominate the evening sky for several months, even as Earth’s faster orbital track begins to speed us farther and farther away. However, Tuesday night was “the night of closest approach,” according to astronomers.

Mars opposition to the sun is a prime time for planetary scientists to launch probes toward Mars, because the time and distance the craft need to traverse are shortest. NASA launched the Mars Phoenix mission toward Mars in August and they hope to land it in the Martian polar north in May.

Two rovers are surveying the planet from ground level, three orbiters are mapping the globe from above and another lander is on the way for this event.

"It's often surprising to people that, despite the fact that we have this armada of orbiters, landers and rovers on Mars, we can still do useful and unique scientific observations of Mars from Earth," said Cornell astronomer Jim Bell, a member of the Hubble observation team as well as the lead scientist for the panoramic color cameras on NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers.

Scientists are particularly interested in how water moves around between Mars’ surface ice and the atmosphere due to the planet’s seasonal changes.

"There's an enormous amount of water-ice cloudiness in the wintertime. How that super-cloudy season changes from the wintertime through the spring and the summer is still a subject of scientific debate." Bell said.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have been taking advantage of the shortest distance between the two planets, taking a series of photographs of the Red Planet and stitching them together into a video animation of a rotating Mars.

Anyone who wants to get a look at Mars in the next few weeks can use the sky map from Sky & Telescope magazine.