To the more poetic among us, summer is a time of soft breezes, warm nights, and fireflies: The livin’ is easy, the breeze makes us feel fine, the warm Sun shines kindly upon us.

But there’s less poetry in the summers on Mars – especially in the northern hemisphere, where summer began on Thursday. It stays cold, and the only fireflies are occasional meteors blazing through the night.

Like the seasons on Earth, those on Mars are caused by the planet’s tilt on its axis. Northern summer begins when the north pole dips most directly toward the Sun. But Mars’s orbit is much more lopsided than Earth’s, so there’s a much greater change in the planet’s distance from the Sun. Mars is farthest from the Sun during northern summer. So the summer stays fairly cool.

Summers and winters tend to be quiet times in the planet’s thin atmosphere. Big dust storms fire up in spring and fall, sometimes covering the whole planet. But they settle down by the start of summer. Mars does see more “dust devils” during summer – whirlwinds that can tower miles high.

Northern summer will last for 178 Mars days – not giving way until the start of autumn exactly six months from now.

Mars is close to the upper left of the Moon at nightfall, and looks like a fairly bright orange star. The true star Regulus is farther along that line. More about this lineup tomorrow.

Script by Damond Benningfield