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 4°59' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 7 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 16:46 (EST), 33° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 17:13, 34° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 21:21, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -11.8, and Mars at mag 0.2, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h01m50s 8°30'S Aquarius -11.8 31'41"3
Mars 22h01m50s 13°30'S Aquarius 0.2 8"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 82° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Nov 2033

The sky on 28 November 2033
Sunrise
06:47
Sunset
16:12
Twilight ends
17:52
Twilight begins
05:07


Waxing Crescent

49%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:38 10:35 15:32
Venus 06:03 10:54 15:45
Moon 11:36 17:05 22:41
Mars 12:00 17:12 22:25
Jupiter 12:03 17:18 22:33
Saturn 19:13 02:41 10:09
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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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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