Close approach of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 4°41' of each other. The Moon will be 18 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:26, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:02, 24° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 04:47, 20° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4; and Mars will be at mag -2.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h47m00s 18°15'S Capricornus -12.4 29'26"0
Mars 20h50m50s 22°51'S Capricornus -2.2 20"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 149° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jun 2018

The sky on 30 June 2018
Sunrise
05:08
Sunset
20:25
Twilight ends
22:39
Twilight begins
02:54


Waning Gibbous

90%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:01 14:27 21:53
Venus 08:30 15:37 22:44
Moon 21:35 02:21 07:11
Mars 22:28 03:02 07:35
Jupiter 15:45 20:52 02:00
Saturn 20:00 00:34 05:09
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

26 Jun 2018  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
27 Jul 2018  –  Mars at opposition
31 Jul 2018  –  Mars at perigee
27 Aug 2018  –  Mars ends retrograde motion

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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