Date: January 13, 2024
Earlier this week the Moon "eclipsed" Mars. This event is called an Occultation. This will not occur again visible in North America until 2035; it was additional unique during a full moon and with Mars nearly a close to Earth as it gets. Thus appearing Mars at its largest and brightest its two year cycle.
On Monday night, I drove to the top of the hill, here in little downtown Fairburn, to get out of the trees. Set up my tripod in an empty parking lot, and waited. I then watched as Mars got ever closer to the Moon; or maybe the Moon got closer to Mars... either way, eventually Mars disappeared behing the Moon for an hour and 7 minutes.
Let's review some numbers and do some math. The Moon is 250,000 miles away. Mars is currently nearly 60 million miles away. Both lit by the Sun on the opposite side of Earth, at 92 million miles away. So the Sun is 152 million miles away from Mars. These distances mean that the light from the sun takes 8.2 minutes to reach us here on Earth; it then takes another 5.3 minutes to reach Mars. Then it reflects off of Mars and travels 5.3 minutes back to Earth for us to see. So the light that we are seeing from Mars originated from the Sun nearly 19 minutes in the past!
Earlier this week the Moon "eclipsed" Mars. This event is called an Occultation. This will not occur again visible in North America until 2035; it was additional unique during a full moon and with Mars nearly a close to Earth as it gets. Thus appearing Mars at its largest and brightest its two year cycle.
On Monday night, I drove to the top of the hill, here in little downtown Fairburn, to get out of the trees. Set up my tripod in an empty parking lot, and waited. I then watched as Mars got ever closer to the Moon; or maybe the Moon got closer to Mars... either way, eventually Mars disappeared behing the Moon for an hour and 7 minutes.
Let's review some numbers and do some math. The Moon is 250,000 miles away. Mars is currently nearly 60 million miles away. Both lit by the Sun on the opposite side of Earth, at 92 million miles away. So the Sun is 152 million miles away from Mars. These distances mean that the light from the sun takes 8.2 minutes to reach us here on Earth; it then takes another 5.3 minutes to reach Mars. Then it reflects off of Mars and travels 5.3 minutes back to Earth for us to see. So the light that we are seeing from Mars originated from the Sun nearly 19 minutes in the past!
I shot multiple frames every 3 seconds and will be stacking images later for better clarity!
Camera: Canon R7
Lens: Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary
Exposure: 1/200s f/10 ISO200
Editing: Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile on Android
Star Tracker Mount: Skywatcher AZ GTI
