======================== Mars went through a fairly distant opposition in the spring of 2014, so for the rest of that year it became more distant, smaller, and moved more rapidly through the constellations.  Therefore, in early 2015, we see it still hanging around in the evening sky, slowly fading and sinking toward the twilight before its conjunction behind the Sun in late spring.  Here we see Mars in western Aquarius, in what must have been a fairly short exposure that didn't catch many stars, which unfortunately means that I didn't record Neptune, the position of which is circled on the images.  On this date, Mars is magnitude +1.15 and Neptune is +7.95.