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 2°24' of each other. The Moon will be 13 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:21 (EST), 14° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:29, 39° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:13, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5; and Mars will be at mag -2.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

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 23h15m40s 6°02'S Aquarius -12.5 30'53"4
Mars 23h18m40s 8°19'S Aquarius -2.1 20"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 147° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Oct 2035

The sky on 14 October 2035
Sunrise
06:52
Sunset
18:03
Twilight ends
19:37
Twilight begins
05:18


Waxing Gibbous

94%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:22 11:26 17:31
Venus 08:24 13:35 18:46
Moon 17:08 22:58 04:57
Mars 16:56 22:29 04:01
Jupiter 19:14 02:18 09:22
Saturn 01:24 08:30 15:36
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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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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