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°07' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 18 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 21:55, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:47, 41° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:35, 27° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5 in the constellation Pisces, and Mars at mag -2.4 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

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 00h00m50s 2°16'S Pisces -12.5 30'51"7
Mars 00h00m50s 6°24'S Cetus -2.4 22"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 148° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Aug 2035

The sky on 21 August 2035
Sunrise
05:54
Sunset
19:36
Twilight ends
21:20
Twilight begins
04:09


Waning Gibbous

89%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:10 14:20 20:29
Venus 06:10 13:00 19:49
Moon 20:38 02:25 08:20
Mars 21:08 02:47 08:27
Jupiter 22:50 05:56 13:02
Saturn 04:27 11:39 18:52
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
15 Oct 2035  –  Mars ends retrograde motion

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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