The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 26' 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 Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 01:14, when they reach an altitude of 11° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 06:04, 51° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:22, 51° above your southern horizon.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -12.0, and Mars at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h01m40s 3°52'S Virgo -12.0 32'12"2
Mars 13h01m40s 4°19'S Virgo 0.9 6"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 87° 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

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

41%

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.

Related news

19 Apr 1965  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
08 Mar 1967  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
15 Apr 1967  –  Mars at opposition
21 Apr 1967  –  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

Los Angeles

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.24°W
PST

Color scheme