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 11.9 arcminutes of each other.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:48 (PDT) – 3 hours and 42 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 33° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:35.

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 1.5; 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°28'N Cancer 1.5 4"4
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 46° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Sep 2028

The sky on 16 September 2028
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
18:52
Twilight ends
20:15
Twilight begins
05:07

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

2%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:27 14:03 19:38
Venus 03:12 09:59 16:46
Moon 04:02 10:49 17:27
Mars 02:48 09:43 16:39
Jupiter 07:21 13:21 19:22
Saturn 21:04 03:40 10:15
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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