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 1°15' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 3 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 18:39 (EST), 22° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 47 minutes after the Sun at 20:43.

The Moon will be at mag -10.0, and Mars at mag 1.4, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h39m10s 11°31'N Pisces -10.0 32'05"7
Mars 01h39m10s 10°16'N Pisces 1.4 4"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 33° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Mar 2032

The sky on 13 March 2032
Sunrise
06:05
Sunset
17:56
Twilight ends
19:29
Twilight begins
04:33


Waxing Crescent

11%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:03 12:17 18:31
Venus 05:23 10:45 16:06
Moon 07:02 13:42 20:32
Mars 07:23 14:03 20:42
Jupiter 03:31 08:15 12:59
Saturn 10:01 17:25 00:49
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