© NASA/Hubble Space Telescope

Mars at apogee

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Outer Planets feed

Objects: Mars
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The sky at

Mars orbit around the Sun will carry it to its furthest point from the Earth – its apogee – moving to a distance of 2.64 AU from us. Since the size and brightness of Mars in the night sky both decrease when it is far away from us, this marks the moment when it will appear smallest, measuring a mere 3.6 arcsec in diameter. However, in practice, it will be rather too close to the Sun for observation, at an angular separation of only 4.9148698644288° from it, as it will be close to solar conjunction.

A chart of the path of Mars across the sky in 2032 can be found here, and a chart of its rising and setting times here.

The position of Mars at the moment it passes apogee will be:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Mars 08h06m40s 21°19'N Cancer 1.7 3.6"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 26 Jul 2032

The sky on 26 July 2032
Sunrise
05:55
Sunset
19:50
Twilight ends
21:25
Twilight begins
04:20

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

70%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:44 12:28 19:12
Venus 07:07 13:54 20:41
Moon 21:54 04:07 10:27
Mars 05:33 12:34 19:35
Jupiter 19:17 00:22 05:26
Saturn 03:28 10:33 17:37
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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.

Related news

13 Jun 2031  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
26 May 2033  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
27 Jun 2033  –  Mars at opposition
05 Jul 2033  –  Mars at perigee

Image credit

© NASA/Hubble Space Telescope

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