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°51' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 10 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:21 (EDT), 59° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 20:43, 60° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:29, when they sink below 9° above your western 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 -12.3 in the constellation Sextans, and Mars at mag -0.0 in the neighbouring constellation of Leo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 10h31m10s 3°38'N Sextans -12.3 31'55"6
Mars 10h31m10s 11°30'N Leo -0.0 9"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 116° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2024

The sky on 28 March 2024
Sunrise
06:40
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:47
Twilight begins
05:06

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

84%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:08 13:57 20:46
Venus 06:08 11:53 17:38
Moon 21:47 02:58 08:00
Mars 05:29 10:52 16:16
Jupiter 08:21 15:22 22:23
Saturn 05:52 11:26 17:00
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

13 Apr 2012  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
01 Mar 2014  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
08 Apr 2014  –  Mars at opposition
14 Apr 2014  –  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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