The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°09' of each other. The Moon will be 8 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will become visible at around 20:54 (EDT), 26° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 24 minutes after the Sun at 23:43.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -11.7; and Mars will be at mag 0.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 14h08m50s 11°51'S Virgo -11.7 30'37"8
Mars 14h06m40s 13°56'S Virgo 0.4 7"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 83° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Mar 2024

The sky on 19 March 2024
Sunrise
07:12
Sunset
19:20
Twilight ends
20:50
Twilight begins
05:42

9-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

75%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:48 14:17 20:45
Venus 06:31 12:04 17:36
Moon 13:55 21:42 05:20
Mars 06:00 11:18 16:35
Jupiter 09:12 16:07 23:02
Saturn 06:39 12:14 17:49
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Related news

19 May 2014  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
17 Apr 2016  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
22 May 2016  –  Mars at opposition
30 May 2016  –  Mars at perigee

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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