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 3°00' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 26 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:41 (EDT) – 3 hours and 15 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:04.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 14h17m20s 9°56'S Virgo -10.2 29'30"3
Mars 14h17m20s 12°56'S Virgo 1.7 4"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° 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
06:56
Sunset
16:10
Twilight ends
17:51
Twilight begins
05:15


Waning Crescent

8%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:18 11:45 16:12
Venus 03:10 08:37 14:05
Moon 03:41 09:12 14:39
Mars 03:42 08:57 14:11
Jupiter 12:49 18:52 00:56
Saturn 19:48 03:07 10:25
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.

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