Mars is just about to initiate retro-grade motion in advance of its oppo-sition in Cancer on January 29, 2010. Here we see it one or two days prior to beginning reverse direction and move westward. On this night, Mars shines at magnitude -0.41 and has a diameter of 11.3" arcseconds. Mars' brightness would place it as the 3rd brightest star behind Sirius (-1.46) and Canopus (-0.74).
This picture was taken with my Nikon D40, which was very new to me at the time, and used with an old Nikkor 55 mm f/1.2 lens. The cropped sensor of the D40 results in an effective focal length of about 82 mm if you were to duplicate this field of view with a full frame camera.