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

Lunar occultation of Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Lunar Occultations feed

Objects: Mars

The Moon will pass in front of Mars, creating a lunar occultation visible from countries and territories including southern Argentina, Antarctica, Namibia and southern Chile amongst others.

Unfortunately the occultation will not be visible from Fairfield, though a close conjunction between the pair will be more widely visible.

The map below shows the visibility of the occultation across the world. Separate contours show where the disappearance of Mars is visible (shown in red), and where its reappearance is visible (shown in blue). Solid contours show where each event is likely to be visible through binoculars at a reasonable altitude in the sky. Dotted contours indicate where each event occurs above the horizon, but may not be visible due to the sky being too bright or the Moon being very close to the horizon.

Map showing where the occultation is visible

Outside of the contours, the Moon does not pass in front of Mars at any time, or is below the horizon at the time of the occultation. However, a close conjunction between the pair may be visible.

The map can be downloaded in PNG , PDF or SVG format. A KMZ file , is also available, which can be opened in Google Earth to provide a higher resolution map.

A complete list of the countries and territories where the occultation will be visible is as follows:

Country Time span
(UTC)
Argentina 08:03–01:00
Antarctica 23:27–12:44
Namibia 01:17–18:47
Chile 08:01–01:07
Angola 01:17–23:42
South Africa 01:32–23:13
Uruguay 23:09–22:55
Brazil 22:54–01:21
Falkland Islands 08:14–19:29
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands 23:09–23:10
Saint Helena 21:59–06:08
Bouvet Island 03:48–23:57

Lunar occultations are only ever visible from a small fraction of the Earth's surface. Since the Moon is much closer to the Earth than other celestial objects, its exact position in the sky differs depending on your exact location on Earth due to its large parallax. The position of the Moon as seen from two points on opposite sides of the Earth varies by up to two degrees, or four times the diameter of the full moon.

This means that if the Moon is aligned to pass in front of a particular object for an observer on one side of the Earth, it will appear up to two degrees away from that object on the other side of the Earth.

The position of Mars at the moment of the occultation will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Mars 01h34m40s 6°00'N Pisces -2.5 0'22"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

Next/previous occultations

« Previous Next »
Visible from the Contiguous United States Worldwide Worldwide Visible from the Contiguous United States
18 Feb 2020 06 Sep 2020 Occultations of Mars 17 Apr 2021 08 Dec 2022
22 Sep 2020 22 Sep 2020 Occultations 19 Oct 2020 12 Dec 2020

The sky on 02 Oct 2020

The sky on 02 October 2020
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
18:32
Twilight ends
20:04
Twilight begins
05:16

15-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

97%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:08 14:13 19:18
Venus 03:26 10:12 16:58
Moon 18:53 01:01 07:19
Mars 19:18 01:42 08:07
Jupiter 14:43 19:21 23:59
Saturn 15:09 19:52 00:35
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.

Related news

23 Aug 2020  –  Mars 2020: a great chance to see the red planet
06 Oct 2020  –  Mars at perigee
13 Oct 2020  –  Mars at opposition
30 Nov 2022  –  Mars at perigee

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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