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

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:08 (EST), 25° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 20:45.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4, and Mars at mag 0.7, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 20h05m30s 15°10'S Sagittarius -11.4 32'30"3
Mars 20h05m30s 21°55'S Sagittarius 0.7 6"1

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

The sky on 19 Nov 2031

The sky on 19 November 2031
Sunrise
06:42
Sunset
16:30
Twilight ends
18:06
Twilight begins
05:05


Waxing Crescent

33%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:26 12:55 17:24
Venus 02:56 08:48 14:39
Moon 11:06 16:18 21:36
Mars 11:22 16:04 20:45
Jupiter 09:25 14:00 18:35
Saturn 17:57 01:21 08:45
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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26 May 2033  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
27 Jun 2033  –  Mars at opposition
05 Jul 2033  –  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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