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°04' of each other. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:04 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 28° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:20.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.7 in Scorpius; and Mars will be at mag 1.1 in Libra.

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 15h51m50s 22°30'S Scorpius -11.7 32'20"1
Mars 15h55m30s 19°33'S Libra 1.1 5"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 73° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jun 2024

The sky on 17 June 2024
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:08

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

81%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:29 13:08 20:47
Venus 05:33 13:07 20:42
Moon 16:17 21:30 02:34
Mars 02:35 09:23 16:11
Jupiter 04:00 11:19 18:39
Saturn 00:49 06:30 12:12
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

19 Jun 1984  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
08 Jun 1986  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
10 Jul 1986  –  Mars at opposition
16 Jul 1986  –  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
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