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 1°03' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 22 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 be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:41 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 46° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:59.

The Moon will be at mag -11.5, and Mars at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h36m20s 14°30'N Aries -11.5 30'10"2
Mars 02h36m20s 13°27'N Aries 0.3 7"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 77° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Jul 2022

The sky on 21 July 2022
Sunrise
05:35
Sunset
20:20
Twilight ends
22:18
Twilight begins
03:37


Waning Crescent

34%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:01 13:22 20:44
Venus 03:43 11:13 18:43
Moon 00:31 07:21 14:22
Mars 00:41 07:32 14:23
Jupiter 23:19 05:29 11:39
Saturn 21:31 02:41 07:50
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

13 Nov 2020  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
30 Oct 2022  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
30 Nov 2022  –  Mars at perigee
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.

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