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 3°42' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.9, and Mars at mag 1.2, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h17m50s 4°35'N Pisces -8.9 32'17"8
Mars 00h17m50s 0°52'N Pisces 1.2 4"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Apr 2026

The sky on 15 April 2026
Sunrise
06:11
Sunset
19:32
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:32


Waning Crescent

1%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:28 11:23 17:18
Venus 07:16 14:24 21:32
Moon 05:08 11:15 17:35
Mars 05:29 11:34 17:40
Jupiter 10:59 18:29 01:58
Saturn 05:40 11:46 17:52
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

23 Feb 2025  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
10 Jan 2027  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
19 Feb 2027  –  Mars at opposition
19 Feb 2027  –  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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