Mars orbit around the Sun will carry it to its furthest point from the Earth – its apogee – moving to a distance of 2.66 AU from us. Since the size and brightness of Mars in the night sky both decrease when it is far away from us, this marks the moment when it will appear smallest, measuring a mere 3.5 arcsec in diameter. However, in practice, it will be rather too close to the Sun for observation, at an angular separation of only 3.1658544570527° from it, as it will be close to solar conjunction.
A chart of the path of Mars across the sky in 2017 can be found here, and a chart of its rising and setting times here.
The position of Mars at the moment it passes apogee will be:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| Mars | 08h51m00s | 18°49'N | Cancer | 1.7 | 3.5" |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.
The sky on 5 Aug 2017
| The sky on 5 August 2017 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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96% 13 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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Warning
Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.
Source
The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.
Related news
| 29 Jun 2016 | – Mars ends retrograde motion |
| 26 Jun 2018 | – Mars enters retrograde motion |
| 27 Jul 2018 | – Mars at opposition |
| 31 Jul 2018 | – Mars at perigee |
Image credit
© NASA/Hubble Space Telescope