Close approach of Mars and M22

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

Objects: M22 Mars

Mars and M22 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 36.1 arcminutes of each other.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 13° above the horizon at dusk.

Mars will be at mag 1.1; and M22 will be at mag 5.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mars and M22 around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Mars 18h36m30s 24°30'S Sagittarius 1.1 4"9
M22 18h36m20s 23°54'S Sagittarius 5.2 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Nov 2029

The sky on 15 November 2029
Sunrise
06:38
Sunset
16:33
Twilight ends
18:08
Twilight begins
05:02


Waxing Gibbous

78%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:31 12:12 16:53
Venus 10:32 14:50 19:08
Moon 13:39 19:54 02:18
Mars 10:19 14:49 19:18
Jupiter 05:35 10:47 16:00
Saturn 16:27 23:27 06:27
All times shown in EST.

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.

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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