The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 54' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 17 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:42, when they reach an altitude of 8° above your north-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:14, 72° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 07:26, 34° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6, and Mars at mag -0.9, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair 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.

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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 141° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Dec 2024

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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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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