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 4°16' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 22 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:22 (EST) – 3 hours and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 23° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:17.

The Moon will be at mag -11.8, and Mars at mag 0.2, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h56m00s 14°38'S Capricornus -11.8 30'07"6
Mars 20h56m00s 18°55'S Capricornus 0.2 8"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 87° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Apr 2035

The sky on 30 April 2035
Sunrise
05:49
Sunset
19:47
Twilight ends
21:33
Twilight begins
04:04


Waning Crescent

42%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:38 14:08 21:38
Venus 04:53 11:09 17:24
Moon 01:46 06:52 12:02
Mars 02:22 07:15 12:09
Jupiter 05:31 12:11 18:51
Saturn 11:01 18:22 01:43
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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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.

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