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

Conjunction of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 41' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 29 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 5° above the horizon at dawn.

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The Moon will be at mag -8.9, and Mars at mag 1.6, both in the constellation Libra.

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

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

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 15h20m20s 17°31'S Libra -8.9 33'17"5
Mars 15h20m20s 18°13'S Libra 1.6 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Dec 2021

The sky on 2 December 2021
Sunrise
06:57
Sunset
16:24
Twilight ends
18:02
Twilight begins
05:19

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:14 11:49 16:24
Venus 10:09 14:38 19:08
Moon 04:42 10:03 15:15
Mars 05:29 10:25 15:22
Jupiter 11:44 16:56 22:09
Saturn 10:57 15:51 20:45
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

13 Nov 2020  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
30 Oct 2022  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
30 Nov 2022  –  Mars at perigee
08 Dec 2022  –  Mars at opposition

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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