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 4.8 arcminutes of each other.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:12 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 57° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:52.

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 1.1; 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 08h40m10s 19°35'N Cancer 1.1 5"8
M44 08h40m20s 19°40'N Cancer 3.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 70° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Oct 2026

The sky on 11 October 2026
Sunrise
06:47
Sunset
18:20
Twilight ends
19:42
Twilight begins
05:25

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:52 14:05 19:19
Venus 08:27 13:33 18:39
Moon 07:50 13:20 18:43
Mars 01:12 08:08 15:04
Jupiter 02:19 09:02 15:44
Saturn 18:04 00:11 06:18
All times shown in PDT.

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

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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