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 11.2 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 7° above the horizon at dawn.

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Mars will be at mag 1.4; and M22 will be at mag 5.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 18h36m20s 23°43'S Sagittarius 1.4 4"3
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 37° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Feb 2022

The sky on 5 February 2022
Sunrise
06:51
Sunset
17:02
Twilight ends
18:39
Twilight begins
05:15

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

24%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:33 10:24 15:14
Venus 04:29 09:30 14:31
Moon 09:26 15:44 22:12
Mars 04:49 09:18 13:48
Jupiter 07:52 13:21 18:49
Saturn 06:56 11:55 16:53
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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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