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 2°03' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 4 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 19:44 (EST), 16° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 29 minutes after the Sun at 21:35.

The Moon will be at mag -11.3, and Mars at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h19m20s 21°30'S Libra -11.3 32'33"5
Mars 15h19m20s 19°27'S Libra 0.9 5"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 63° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Sep 2029

The sky on 12 September 2029
Sunrise
06:27
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:41
Twilight begins
04:52


Waxing Crescent

32%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:09 13:04 19:00
Venus 10:06 15:23 20:39
Moon 11:45 16:35 21:19
Mars 11:51 16:42 21:34
Jupiter 09:38 15:07 20:36
Saturn 21:53 04:57 12:01
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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05 May 2029  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
28 Mar 2031  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
04 May 2031  –  Mars at opposition
11 May 2031  –  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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