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°20' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 21 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:46, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:33, 61° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:18, 60° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Mars at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Leo.

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 10h17m20s 9°45'N Leo -12.1 31'48"1
Mars 10h17m20s 13°06'N Leo 0.5 7"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 95° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Nov 2026

The sky on 30 November 2026
Sunrise
06:55
Sunset
16:24
Twilight ends
18:02
Twilight begins
05:17


Waning Crescent

49%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:28 10:31 15:35
Venus 03:28 08:59 14:29
Moon 22:14 05:13 11:58
Mars 22:42 05:33 12:23
Jupiter 22:20 05:11 12:03
Saturn 13:40 19:45 01:50
All times shown in EST.

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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