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 4°52' of each other. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:12 (EDT) – 3 hours and 22 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 21° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:00.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6; and Mars will be at mag 0.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h35m20s 17°29'S Sagittarius -11.6 29'52"3
Mars 19h37m30s 22°20'S Sagittarius 0.6 7"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 78° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Apr 2035

The sky on 1 April 2035
Sunrise
06:34
Sunset
19:16
Twilight ends
20:51
Twilight begins
04:59


Waning Crescent

35%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:33 12:41 18:49
Venus 05:23 10:52 16:21
Moon 02:21 07:24 12:28
Mars 03:11 07:50 12:30
Jupiter 07:08 13:39 20:09
Saturn 12:50 20:12 03:34
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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