On August 27 the earth and Mars will pass just 34.6 million miles apart. Mars will appear 58 times brighter than it did on January 1. As Francis Reddy points out, the last time this happened, Neanderthals flourished and humans had not yet made it to Australia.

If you paste “34,649,589” into Google, you’ll get to a bunch of sites on this, including Celestial Delights Online, which has a beautiful poster you can download and an animation showing how the image of Mars will change.