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 53' to the south 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 Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:32 (PST) and reaching an altitude of 34° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:10.

The Moon will be at mag -11.0, and Mars at mag 1.4, both in the constellation Libra.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 15h07m10s 17°35'S Libra -11.0 29'30"1
Mars 15h07m10s 16°41'S Libra 1.4 4"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 58° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
16:44
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Crescent

36%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:14 13:03 17:52
Venus 09:51 14:41 19:30
Moon 23:38 06:20 12:53
Mars 21:07 04:11 11:15
Jupiter 17:41 00:48 07:55
Saturn 12:58 18:37 00:15
All times shown in PST.

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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30 Jul 2097  –  Mars at opposition
03 Aug 2097  –  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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