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 5°45' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From user-specified location however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 11° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1 in the constellation Aquarius, and Mars at mag 1.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Capricornus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 21h26m30s 10°29'S Aquarius -10.1 31'21"0
Mars 21h26m30s 16°14'S Capricornus 1.2 4"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jan 2030

The sky on 6 January 2030
Sunrise
09:56
Sunset
16:54
Twilight ends
19:21
Twilight begins
07:30


Waxing Crescent

12%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:42 12:29 16:15
Venus 09:20 13:23 17:27
Moon 10:51 15:33 20:28
Mars 11:25 15:42 19:58
Jupiter 05:22 09:33 13:44
Saturn 13:37 21:19 05:02
All times shown in GMT+01:00.

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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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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