Moon joins Mars at dawn today in Egyptian and Arabian skies

On Tuesday morning, April 26, 2022, just before sunrise, the skies of Egypt and the Arab world merge with the Moon, where in an event you see naked they are separated by 4 degrees. Eye on a scene as if coming from another world.

A few weeks after Mars reached its solar eclipse on October 8, Mars gradually reappeared in the sky, after which its vision improved with the naked eye and its brightness gradually increased. .

It is important to observe the brightness of Mars on a weekly basis, and to observe how it changes dramatically between today and next October. This is due to the dramatic changes in the brightness of Mars (and its red color). He called this planet the God of War, sometimes the God of War rested, and sometimes he became fierce, which is part of the reason why these changes are so amazing to see in the Mars night sky.

To understand why the brightness of Mars in the Earth’s sky varies so much, we need to understand that Mars is not just a very large planet with a diameter of just 6,790 km, which is half the size of Earth (12,750 km in diameter).

Remember that Mars is not like Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Jupiter has a diameter of 140,000 km and more than 20 planets the size of Mars can be aligned laterally in front of Jupiter, so Jupiter always looks brighter because it is larger, but this does not apply to smaller Mars. Brightness is related to its proximity or distance from the earth.

Mars orbits the Sun outside the Earth’s orbit, changing the distance between Earth and Mars. Sometimes the Earth and Mars are on the same side of the solar system and close together, and sometimes, for the most part, by 2021, Mars and Earth were on approximately opposite sides of the Earth, so Mars appeared dim.

The reason why the red planet is sometimes so bright is that it takes the earth one year to orbit the sun once and about two years for Mars to orbit once.

So the brightness of Mars decreases every two years and increases in the sky, but this is not the only Martian cycle that affects its brightness, there is also a 15-year cycle of bright and dim intersections.

Encounter 2018 is a very special year for Mars, because of that 15-year cycle, the planet was much brighter than it has been since 2003, which astronomers call Perihelian Mars, in other words, in 2018, the Earth went between Mars and the Sun. – This caused Mars to meet in the sky – while Mars was very close to the Sun.

So, in the years that pass between Mars and the Sun, Mars is closer to the Sun, and even closer to Earth and Mars.

This was the previous Perihelion Mars encounter in 2003, and the red planet was 55.7 million km closer to Earth than it was nearly 60,000 years ago, and by 2020, it was even brighter. Not as bright as it was in 2018 or 2003.

The date of the next meeting of Mars will be in the second half of 2022 this year, when the planet will appear in its highest brightness in the sky in two years.