Mars is Bright

[aldrea279]

No: HPFGUIDX 40715

Random Monkey:
>>JKR is an excellent author, and a great storyteller, but c'mon, 
would 
she really have gotten out the star charts and checked if Mars really 
was bright on May 26, 1991?>>

I have to agree with Ranom Monkey here.  I doubt JKR(or any author, 
really) would go so far as to do that.  And once more, since this is 
the magical world we're talking about, I don't see why Mars would be 
bright in a pattern.  That -would- make predicting things by the 
planets pretty unreliable, eh?  You'd get the same stuff over and 
over again.  So since Mars was bright that night, it was bright 
because of whatever reason it wanted to be bright.  That's the way 
I'm going to think of it.

And I like the way the starter of this thread gave a second 
explanation:

Ezzie:
>>It is important to note that Mars was exactly in the middle of 
Aries 
at this time. Astrologically speaking, when in Aries, Mars is "at 
its strongest" in terms of expression of energy. Can we 
conclude then that this is analogous to saying "Mars is bright?" >>

That's entirely possible.  And we know centaurs are smart, so 
probably were able to tell, just by looking up at the sky, that Mars 
was in the middle of the Aries constellation.  


But out of all the exlanations, I like to think that Mars was 
actually bright, and that being bright was just a sign of trouble.  
You ever seen that movie "Practical Magic"?  I remember one scene 
where one of the sisters looks at the sky and says something like "A 
ring around the moon...trouble is coming."  That's the way I think of 
the centaur's comments: they took the brightness as a sign, a warning
(and I find this more believable when Bane[I think] gets mad at Ronan 
for telling Harry what they had read in the stars).  Sign for 
trouble, and with Mars being the Roman god of war...well, I find that 
reasonable.

~Aldrea, who happily puts up her telescope and decides that's all the 
stargazing/theorizing she'd like to do for today.