What is the bright reddish orange looking star in the night skies above Indiana, USA?
This is difficult to know the answer to. You can know which it is with some minor detective work. The possibilities are Mars and Betelgeuse. Most of the time, if you see an unusually bright reddish object in the night skies, I’d guess it is Mars. The other possibility is Betelgeuse, a star that lies near the Pleiades star cluster. The Pleiades, often known as the Seven Sisters, are arguably the easiest such cluster of stars to recognize in the northern skies. Currently, Mars and Betelgeuse are both high in the skies near midnight, so I’m not sure which object you are seeing. A trick to telling if an object is a planet, is to look over several nights. If it is a planet you are watching, then its position with respect to the neighboring stars will change over a period of a few days. So go out one night and draw a picture of the stars around it. Then go back out in a couple of days and look again. If it has moved, then it is a planet. And of course, if it moves rapidly enough to see it mo
