Close approach of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 3°26' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:04 (EST), 29° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 25 minutes after the Sun at 20:47.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5; and Mars will be at mag 1.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 00h14m50s 4°55'N Pisces -10.5 32'32"2
Mars 00h19m20s 1°40'N Pisces 1.2 4"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Feb 2032

The sky on 13 February 2032
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
17:22
Twilight ends
18:55
Twilight begins
05:15


Waxing Crescent

16%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:20 12:41 18:02
Venus 05:28 10:14 14:59
Moon 07:58 14:12 20:36
Mars 08:29 14:37 20:45
Jupiter 05:05 09:45 14:26
Saturn 11:53 19:16 02:39
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.

Related news

13 Jun 2031  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
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.

Share