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 3°06' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 5° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.5, and Mars at mag 1.6, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h24m00s 19°04'N Taurus -8.5 30'53"4
Mars 04h24m00s 22°11'N Taurus 1.6 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2032

The sky on 10 May 2032
Sunrise
05:36
Sunset
19:58
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:45


Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:08 11:54 18:40
Venus 05:26 12:24 19:22
Moon 06:24 13:48 21:15
Mars 06:33 13:59 21:26
Jupiter 01:04 05:53 10:42
Saturn 07:32 14:59 22:25
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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