© 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 2.59 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 8.1973473449306° from it, as it will be close to solar conjunction.

A chart of the path of Mars across the sky in 2038 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 13h18m30s 7°48'S Virgo 1.7 3.6"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 17 Jun 2024

The sky on 17 June 2024
Sunrise
05:04
Sunset
20:23
Twilight ends
22:38
Twilight begins
02:49

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

85%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:16 12:59 20:43
Venus 05:20 12:59 20:38
Moon 16:10 21:21 02:22
Mars 02:25 09:15 16:05
Jupiter 03:48 11:11 18:34
Saturn 00:41 06:22 12:02
All times shown in EDT.

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

23 Dec 2037  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
23 Nov 2039  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
28 Dec 2039  –  Mars at perigee
02 Jan 2040  –  Mars at opposition

Image credit

© NASA/Hubble Space Telescope

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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