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 32' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.6, and Mars at mag 1.2, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 19h51m00s 21°34'S Sagittarius -8.6 29'40"1
Mars 19h51m00s 22°06'S Sagittarius 1.2 4"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Dec 2027

The sky on 29 December 2027
Sunrise
07:10
Sunset
16:18
Twilight ends
18:00
Twilight begins
05:29


Waxing Crescent

4%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:04 12:29 16:55
Venus 09:21 14:11 19:01
Moon 08:36 13:15 18:01
Mars 08:27 13:04 17:40
Jupiter 22:52 05:04 11:16
Saturn 12:07 18:31 00:55
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

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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