The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 57.1 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Mars, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 9 days old.
From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:00 (EST), 32° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 18:23, 35° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 22:42, when they sink below 9° above your south-western horizon.
The Moon will be at mag -11.9; and Mars will be at mag -0.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.
They 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.
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 | 22h11m20s | 13°59'S | Aquarius | -11.9 | 29'39"0 |
| Mars | 22h10m20s | 13°04'S | Aquarius | -0.3 | 10"4 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 96° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.
The sky on 15 Nov 2018
| The sky on 15 November 2018 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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60% 8 days old |
All times shown in EST.
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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.
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| 09 Sep 2020 | – Mars enters retrograde motion |
| 06 Oct 2020 | – 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.