The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 55.6 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 27 days old.
From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 9° above the horizon at dawn.
The Moon will be at mag -9.7; and Mars will be at mag 1.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Ophiuchus.
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 | 16h43m50s | 23°20'S | Ophiuchus | -9.7 | 33'14"8 |
| Mars | 16h44m40s | 22°26'S | Ophiuchus | 1.5 | 3"9 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.
The sky on 31 Dec 2021
| The sky on 31 December 2021 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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3% 27 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.
Related news
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| 08 Dec 2022 | – 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.