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 M8

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Objects: M8 Mars
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The sky at

Mars and M8 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 31.6 arcminutes of each other.

From San Diego however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 11° above the horizon at dawn.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Mars will be at mag 1.4; and M8 will be at mag 5.8. 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 M8 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 18h03m40s 23°51'S Sagittarius 1.4 4"2
M8 18h03m40s 24°22'S Sagittarius 5.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jan 2022

The sky on 25 January 2022
Sunrise
06:45
Sunset
17:14
Twilight ends
18:39
Twilight begins
05:19

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

38%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:15 11:34 16:52
Venus 04:54 10:14 15:34
Moon 23:57 05:43 11:22
Mars 04:34 09:31 14:28
Jupiter 08:22 13:58 19:34
Saturn 07:20 12:36 17:53
All times shown in PST.

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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San Diego

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32.72°N
117.16°W
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