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 5°53' 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 3° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -9.0, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h09m50s 17°40'N Gemini -9.0 32'27"4
Mars 07h09m50s 23°34'N Gemini 1.8 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jun 2034

The sky on 17 June 2034
Sunrise
05:16
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:35
Twilight begins
03:08


Waxing Crescent

5%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:18 12:32 19:46
Venus 08:17 15:39 23:01
Moon 06:49 14:08 21:24
Mars 06:44 14:17 21:51
Jupiter 01:35 07:49 14:02
Saturn 07:12 14:38 22:03
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

01 Aug 2033  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
15 Aug 2035  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
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.

Share