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 2°43' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 4 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Jacksonville , the pair will become visible at around 18:54 (EST), 45° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:31.

The Moon will be at mag -11.1 in the constellation Pisces, and Mars at mag 1.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Aries.

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 01h46m30s 8°37'N Pisces -11.1 32'38"1
Mars 01h46m30s 11°20'N Aries 1.2 5"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Feb 2034

The sky on 22 February 2034
Sunrise
06:57
Sunset
18:19
Twilight ends
19:39
Twilight begins
05:37


Waxing Crescent

25%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:48 11:16 16:44
Venus 07:38 13:24 19:10
Moon 09:29 15:56 22:28
Mars 09:31 16:01 22:30
Jupiter 07:37 13:25 19:12
Saturn 14:17 21:16 04:15
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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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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