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 4°43' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 15° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:59 (EST) – 2 hours and 17 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:27.

The Moon will be at mag -9.3, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair 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.

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 09h34m40s 10°56'N Leo -9.3 29'40"5
Mars 09h34m40s 15°39'N Leo 1.8 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Nov 2024

The sky on 25 November 2024
Sunrise
06:45
Sunset
16:14
Twilight ends
17:54
Twilight begins
05:05


Waning Crescent

23%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:26 12:49 17:13
Venus 10:11 14:34 18:58
Moon 01:14 07:25 13:26
Mars 20:30 03:57 11:23
Jupiter 17:01 00:31 08:02
Saturn 12:50 18:21 23:51
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

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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