Mars madness gripped stargazers in Nashville as Tuesday night passed into Wednesday morning and the planet Mars passed closer to the Earth than it had in 60,000 years. Rick Chappell, director of Vanderbilt University’s Dyer Observatory, estimated that between 800 and 1,000 people turned up for the chance to look at the red planet through the observatory’s 24-inch window onto the universe. Octogenarians, toddlers and those in between waited up to four hours in order to say they had been present at the cosmic event.