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 M44

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Objects: M44 Mars
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The sky at

Mars and M44 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 10.4 arcminutes of each other.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 21:34 (EST), 24° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 45 minutes after the Sun at 00:00.

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 1.6; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mars and M44 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 08h40m30s 19°50'N Cancer 1.6 4"6
M44 08h40m20s 19°40'N Cancer 3.1 108'36"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 55° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jun 2023

The sky on 2 June 2023
Sunrise
05:07
Sunset
20:15
Twilight ends
22:24
Twilight begins
02:58

14-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:09 11:04 18:00
Venus 08:21 15:58 23:34
Moon 19:02 23:43 04:16
Mars 09:19 16:40 00:00
Jupiter 03:21 10:07 16:54
Saturn 01:13 06:37 12:02
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
EST

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