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 23' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 25 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 14° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:23 (EST) – 2 hours and 4 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 14° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:47.

The Moon will be at mag -10.9, and Mars at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 23h15m10s 6°03'S Aquarius -10.9 29'54"9
Mars 23h15m10s 6°26'S Aquarius 0.9 5"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 54° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
07:23
Sunset
17:10
Twilight ends
18:45
Twilight begins
05:47


Waning Crescent

44%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:15 13:45 18:15
Venus 10:48 15:18 19:49
Moon 22:59 06:12 13:13
Mars 21:34 04:54 12:13
Jupiter 18:09 01:32 08:56
Saturn 13:47 19:20 00:53
All times shown in EST.

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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11 Dec 2054  –  Mars at perigee
17 Dec 2054  –  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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