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

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The sky at

The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 7'18" to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 7 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:09 (EST), 27° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 19:21, 27° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 22:54, when they sink below 9° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.8, and Mars at mag -0.0, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h59m30s 23°04'S Sagittarius -11.8 29'54"0
Mars 19h59m30s 22°57'S Sagittarius -0.0 9"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 86° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
07:23
Sunset
17:10
Twilight ends
18:45
Twilight begins
05:47

21-day old moon
Waning Crescent

46%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:15 13:45 18:15
Venus 10:48 15:18 19:49
Moon 22:59 06:12 13:13
Mars 21:34 04:54 12:13
Jupiter 18:09 01:32 08:56
Saturn 13:47 19:20 00:53
All times shown in EST.

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 Jul 2001  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
29 Jul 2003  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
27 Aug 2003  –  Mars at perigee
28 Aug 2003  –  Mars at opposition

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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Columbus

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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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