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 31' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 28 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 7° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.5, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 11h59m10s 0°41'N Virgo -8.5 30'07"4
Mars 11h59m10s 1°12'N Virgo 1.8 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Oct 2034

The sky on 10 October 2034
Sunrise
06:55
Sunset
18:19
Twilight ends
19:51
Twilight begins
05:24


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:22 12:49 18:15
Venus 08:41 13:30 18:19
Moon 05:09 11:29 17:41
Mars 05:27 11:34 17:42
Jupiter 17:59 00:07 06:14
Saturn 00:44 08:00 15:15
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.

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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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