Close approach of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°53' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:48 (EST) – 3 hours and 13 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:10.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2; and Mars will be at mag 1.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 14h20m40s 10°09'S Virgo -10.2 29'29"7
Mars 14h17m30s 12°57'S Virgo 1.7 4"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Dec 2034

The sky on 7 December 2034
Sunrise
07:01
Sunset
16:22
Twilight ends
18:02
Twilight begins
05:22


Waning Crescent

8%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:22 11:53 16:25
Venus 03:17 08:46 14:15
Moon 03:53 09:21 14:44
Mars 03:49 09:05 14:22
Jupiter 12:57 19:01 01:04
Saturn 20:00 03:15 10:31
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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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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