Conjunction of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 6°28' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:19 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 55° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:28.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4, and Mars at mag 1.2, both in the constellation Leo.

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

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 09h28m00s 9°59'N Leo -11.4 31'58"3
Mars 09h28m00s 16°27'N Leo 1.2 5"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 66° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Nov 2024

The sky on 29 November 2024
Sunrise
06:54
Sunset
16:24
Twilight ends
18:03
Twilight begins
05:16


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:05 12:38 17:10
Venus 10:17 14:48 19:19
Moon 05:30 10:19 15:01
Mars 20:28 03:52 11:15
Jupiter 16:55 00:22 07:49
Saturn 12:42 18:14 23:46
All times shown in EST.

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

10 Mar 2010  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
23 Jan 2012  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
03 Mar 2012  –  Mars at opposition
05 Mar 2012  –  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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