Seen with the naked eye...the moon is in conjunction with Mars at dawn tomorrow

2024-06-30 2024-06-30T11:17:56Z

Weather of Arabia - The conjunction of the waning crescent moon with the planet Mars will be observed in the skies of the Arab world tomorrow morning, as they will be separated by 4 degrees in a phenomenon visible to the naked eye.

The President of the Astronomical Society in Jeddah, Engineer Majid Abu Zahra, stated that the Moon and Mars will appear 3 hours and 30 minutes before sunrise towards the eastern horizon. Due to the wide apparent distance between the Moon and Mars, the two will not appear together in the field of view of the telescope, but they can be seen clearly through binoculars. He pointed out that monitoring the brightness of Mars weekly is very important to monitor how it changes significantly between now and the day of opposition in mid-January 2025, and these changes make... Watching Mars in the night sky is fun, and to find out why the brightness of Mars varies so much in Earth's sky, you must know that Mars is not a very large planet, as it is only 6,790 kilometers in diameter.

Abu Zahira said:

“The reason the red planet - Mars - is sometimes bright is because Earth takes a year to orbit the Sun once, while Mars takes about two years to orbit once. Mars opposition - when Earth passes between Mars and the Sun - occurs every two years and 50 days, so “The brightness of Mars waxes and wanes in the sky about every two years, but this is not the only cycle of Mars that affects its brightness, as there is also a 15-year cycle of bright and faint oppositions.”