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 6°05' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 16° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:59 (EDT), 16° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 14 minutes after the Sun at 22:29.

The Moon will be at mag -9.7, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 05h47m50s 18°19'N Taurus -9.7 32'50"8
Mars 05h47m50s 24°24'N Taurus 1.7 3"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 19 May 2034

The sky on 19 May 2034
Sunrise
06:27
Sunset
20:15
Twilight ends
21:47
Twilight begins
04:55


Waxing Crescent

9%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:46 14:54 22:01
Venus 08:33 15:40 22:46
Moon 08:00 15:01 22:04
Mars 08:18 15:22 22:27
Jupiter 03:53 09:59 16:04
Saturn 09:53 16:51 23:49
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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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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