Amazing Sky by Alan Dyer

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. 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.

Mars was at opposition this night and so was the Moon, so the Moon was full and Mars was at its brightest for this appearance in 2022. The size of the Martian disk was 17 arc seconds across this night and its magnitude was -1.8. Mars is twice the actual size of the Moon, but appears tiny here due to its greater distance — some 206 times farther away than the Moon. This night, the Moon was 397,000 kilometres away, near is apogee point, while Mars was 82 million kilometres away, a week after its closest approach.

This is a blend of 40 exposures (20 pre-ingress at left and 20 post-egress at right) that each contained the Moon and Mars. The Moon image here is a single exposure taken at the end of the sequence when the sky was clearest. However, for many of the images, especially pre-ingress, the Moon and Mars were in light cloud and haze, adding the glow around the Moon. The sky is from a blend of all the images.

I shot images at one per minute, but used only every second frame here, so the images are two minutes apart, taken over 40 minutes on ether side of ingress and egress.

Each is a unique image subject to varying seeing conditions blurring some of the Mars disks more than others. This is not a composite made of the same "best" Mars image copied and pasted along what its path should have been. Even so, I still had to adjust the alignment somewhat for each image, as the field still drifted out over several minutes of tracking,