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

Close approach of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 3°32' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:40 (EDT) – 3 hours and 11 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 26° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:05.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.3; and Mars will be at mag 1.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 10h24m50s 15°06'N Leo -10.3 32'55"1
Mars 10h19m50s 11°46'N Leo 1.7 4"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:38
Sunset
19:14
Twilight ends
20:49
Twilight begins
05:04

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

80%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:05 13:55 20:44
Venus 06:07 11:54 17:41
Moon 22:53 03:44 08:28
Mars 05:27 10:51 16:16
Jupiter 08:18 15:19 22:20
Saturn 05:48 11:22 16:56
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.

Related news

11 May 1982  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
05 Apr 1984  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
11 May 1984  –  Mars at opposition
19 May 1984  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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