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°22' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 20 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:30, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:22, 41° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:06, 40° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.3 in the constellation Pisces, and Mars at mag -1.7 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

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 23h49m30s 3°10'S Pisces -12.3 30'42"8
Mars 23h49m30s 6°32'S Aquarius -1.7 18"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 125° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jul 2035

The sky on 25 July 2035
Sunrise
05:26
Sunset
20:11
Twilight ends
22:11
Twilight begins
03:25


Waning Gibbous

74%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:59 13:18 20:38
Venus 05:04 12:32 19:59
Moon 22:29 04:27 10:32
Mars 22:43 04:22 10:02
Jupiter 00:28 07:31 14:34
Saturn 05:55 13:12 20:28
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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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.

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