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 1°08' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 22 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 01:41, when they reach an altitude of 11° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 06:11, 42° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:30, 41° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -11.7, and Mars at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h24m10s 5°40'S Virgo -11.7 29'32"8
Mars 13h24m10s 6°48'S Virgo 1.0 6"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 84° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jul 2024

The sky on 3 July 2024
Sunrise
05:22
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:35
Twilight begins
03:15


Waning Crescent

4%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:57 14:20 21:44
Venus 06:00 13:30 21:00
Moon 02:47 10:46 18:54
Mars 02:04 09:06 16:08
Jupiter 03:09 10:31 17:53
Saturn 23:46 05:28 11:09
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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29 Apr 2076  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
20 Mar 2078  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
26 Apr 2078  –  Mars at opposition
04 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.

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