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 6°55' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:37 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 41° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:50.

The Moon will be at mag -11.1, and Mars at mag 1.5, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 12h00m20s 5°16'S Virgo -11.1 31'46"1
Mars 12h00m20s 1°39'N Virgo 1.5 4"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 56° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Nov 2030

The sky on 20 November 2030
Sunrise
06:38
Sunset
16:17
Twilight ends
17:56
Twilight begins
04:59


Waning Crescent

17%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:34 12:55 17:15
Venus 07:20 12:01 16:41
Moon 01:10 07:14 13:08
Mars 01:36 07:45 13:55
Jupiter 07:18 12:01 16:44
Saturn 16:46 00:03 07:21
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.

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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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