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°51' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 13° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -9.7, and Mars at mag 1.6, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h33m30s 14°06'S Libra -9.7 31'01"3
Mars 15h33m30s 18°57'S Libra 1.6 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 29° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2024

The sky on 7 July 2024
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
21:03
Twilight ends
23:03
Twilight begins
04:07


Waxing Crescent

3%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:57 15:10 22:23
Venus 06:50 14:14 21:38
Moon 07:29 15:12 22:44
Mars 02:38 09:40 16:43
Jupiter 03:39 10:58 18:17
Saturn 00:09 05:51 11:33
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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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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