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 5°16' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 24 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:21 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 52° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:23.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4, and Mars at mag 0.8, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 05h37m30s 28°26'N Taurus -11.4 31'04"3
Mars 05h37m30s 23°10'N Taurus 0.8 6"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 69° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Aug 2024

The sky on 27 August 2024
Sunrise
06:01
Sunset
19:26
Twilight ends
21:07
Twilight begins
04:19


Waning Crescent

27%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:01 11:49 18:38
Venus 07:59 14:10 20:21
Moon 23:13 07:24 15:41
Mars 00:20 07:56 15:31
Jupiter 23:57 07:28 14:59
Saturn 19:58 01:34 07:10
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

12 Jan 2023  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
06 Dec 2024  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
12 Jan 2025  –  Mars at perigee
15 Jan 2025  –  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.

Share