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 6°13' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:09 (EDT) – 3 hours and 9 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 24° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:32.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.0, and Mars at mag 1.6, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h22m50s 14°11'N Cancer -10.0 29'43"2
Mars 08h22m50s 20°25'N Cancer 1.6 4"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Leo 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

79%

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

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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