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°13' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 15 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 between 19:55 and 05:23. They will become accessible at around 19:55, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:39, 39° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:23 when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6, and Mars at mag -2.8, both in the constellation 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 23h38m40s 4°06'S Aquarius -12.6 30'57"5
Mars 23h38m40s 8°20'S Aquarius -2.8 24"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 178° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Sep 2035

The sky on 17 September 2035
Sunrise
06:22
Sunset
18:50
Twilight ends
20:26
Twilight begins
04:46


Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:53 13:28 19:03
Venus 07:17 13:17 19:18
Moon 18:38 00:20 06:09
Mars 19:06 00:39 06:11
Jupiter 21:05 04:12 11:18
Saturn 02:57 10:06 17:15
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.

Related news

15 Sep 2035  –  Mars at opposition
15 Oct 2035  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
12 Oct 2037  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
11 Nov 2037  –  Mars at perigee

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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