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 3°08' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , 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 04:03 (PDT) – 2 hours and 5 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 14° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:24.

The Moon will be at mag -9.4, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h59m20s 24°42'N Gemini -9.4 30'12"1
Mars 07h59m20s 21°34'N Gemini 1.7 3"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Apr 2026

The sky on 29 April 2026
Sunrise
06:02
Sunset
19:33
Twilight ends
21:06
Twilight begins
04:30


Waxing Gibbous

98%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:28 11:50 18:13
Venus 07:31 14:38 21:45
Moon 18:05 23:39 05:07
Mars 05:01 11:18 17:34
Jupiter 10:31 17:40 00:48
Saturn 04:49 10:56 17:03
All times shown in PDT.

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

29 Apr 2076  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
20 Mar 2078  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
26 Apr 2078  –  Mars at opposition
03 May 2078  –  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.

Share