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 9°50' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 16 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:00 (EST), 11° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 23:34, 58° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 05:30, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8, 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 10h59m00s 1°06'N Leo -12.8 32'37"6
Mars 10h59m00s 10°56'N Leo -1.2 13"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 174° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Nov 2024

The sky on 28 November 2024
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
16:13
Twilight ends
17:53
Twilight begins
05:08


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:08 12:35 17:02
Venus 10:12 14:38 19:04
Moon 04:19 09:25 14:23
Mars 20:20 03:46 11:13
Jupiter 16:47 00:18 07:49
Saturn 12:38 18:09 23:40
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

05 Mar 2012  –  Mars at perigee
13 Apr 2012  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
01 Mar 2014  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
08 Apr 2014  –  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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