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°04' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 6 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:59 (EST), 51° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:52.

The Moon will be at mag -11.2, and Mars at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h40m10s 4°47'N Pisces -11.2 30'08"3
Mars 01h40m10s 10°52'N Pisces 1.0 5"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 63° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Feb 2019

The sky on 10 February 2019
Sunrise
06:52
Sunset
17:20
Twilight ends
18:53
Twilight begins
05:19


Waxing Crescent

32%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:25 12:42 17:59
Venus 04:19 09:03 13:47
Moon 09:57 16:20 22:51
Mars 09:28 16:10 22:52
Jupiter 03:05 07:44 12:23
Saturn 04:59 09:39 14:20
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.

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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.

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