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

Close approach of Mars and M22

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Objects: M22 Mars
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The sky at

Mars and M22 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 45.8 arcminutes of each other.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 15° above the horizon at dusk.

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Mars will be at mag 0.9; 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°39'S Sagittarius 0.9 5"4
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 54° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2024

The sky on 28 March 2024
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:42
Twilight begins
04:55

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

85%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:58 13:49 20:39
Venus 06:00 11:45 17:29
Moon 21:41 02:49 07:48
Mars 05:22 10:44 16:05
Jupiter 08:10 15:13 22:17
Saturn 05:45 11:17 16:50
All times shown in EDT.

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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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