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 9°56' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 12 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:14 (EST), 16° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:34, 19° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:34, when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Mars at mag -1.8, 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 17h57m50s 18°29'S Sagittarius -12.5 31'12"3
Mars 17h57m50s 28°26'S Sagittarius -1.8 19"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 134° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Aug 2033

The sky on 7 August 2033
Sunrise
05:39
Sunset
19:55
Twilight ends
21:47
Twilight begins
03:47


Waxing Gibbous

88%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:31 11:54 19:18
Venus 02:46 10:16 17:46
Moon 17:24 22:19 03:17
Mars 17:29 21:34 01:40
Jupiter 20:44 02:05 07:27
Saturn 03:12 10:43 18:13
All times shown in EDT.

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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11 Sep 2035  –  Mars at perigee
15 Sep 2035  –  Mars at opposition

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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