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 4°43' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 5 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 become visible at around 21:15 (EST), 25° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 12 minutes after the Sun at 23:39.

The Moon will be at mag -11.5, and Mars at mag 1.1, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 11h47m00s 2°47'S Virgo -11.5 32'00"3
Mars 11h47m00s 1°56'N Virgo 1.1 5"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 71° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jul 2027

The sky on 9 July 2027
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:31
Twilight begins
03:20


Waxing Crescent

39%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:19 11:35 18:51
Venus 04:44 12:16 19:49
Moon 12:09 17:58 23:36
Mars 11:20 17:30 23:40
Jupiter 08:46 15:38 22:30
Saturn 00:55 07:26 13:58
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.

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01 Apr 2027  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
14 Feb 2029  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
25 Mar 2029  –  Mars at opposition
29 Mar 2029  –  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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