This is the occultation of Mars by the Full Moon on December 7, 2022, in a composite showing the motion of Mars relative to the Moon. The motion here is from left to right. However, while this composite makes it look like Mars was doing the moving, it was really the Moon that was passing in front of Mars. Credit and copyright: Alan Dyer.
Last week gave us a celestial triple header, all in one night. The Moon was full and Mars was at opposition (at its closest point to Earth). But the pièce de résistance was when the Moon occulted or passed in front of Mars on the evening/morning of December 7th/8th. Our astrophotographer friends were out in full force to capture the event.
Our lead image comes from prolific amateur astronomer and photographer Alan Dyer, who observed the occultation from his home in Alberta, Canada, and created this composite view of the night’s activities. “While this composite makes it look like Mars was doing the moving,” Dyer explained on Flickr, “it was really the Moon that was passing in front of Mars. But for this sequence I set the telescope mount to track the Moon at its rate of motion against the background stars and Mars, to keep the Moon more or less stationary on the frame while Mars and the background sky passed behind it.”
Here are some more great views from around the world:
Andrew McCarthy never disappoints, and his high-resolution view from Arizona is incredible:
Here’s an amazingly crisp, clear view from Kerrie Ann Gardner in England:
See below for more great images and videos, compiled from Twitter and from Universe Today’s community on Flickr.
It’s not always possible to observe the night sky from the surface of the Earth.…
SpaceX is flying again after the Federal Aviation Administration ruled that the company can resume…
When we think of Jupiter-type planets, we usually picture massive cloud-covered worlds orbiting far from…
Venus is known for being really quite inhospitable with high surface temperatures and Mars is…
When the James Webb Space Telescope was launched it came with a fanfare expecting amazing…
The extrasolar planet census recently passed a major milestone, with 5500 confirmed candidates in 4,243…