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°32' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 5 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:32 (EST), 18° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 4 minutes after the Sun at 20:58.

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 -11.1, and Mars at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h05m50s 18°24'S Sagittarius -11.1 31'41"9
Mars 18h05m50s 24°56'S Sagittarius 0.9 5"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 56° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
16:27
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:11

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

39%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:37 13:04 17:30
Venus 10:14 14:41 19:08
Moon 23:20 06:15 12:58
Mars 20:49 04:12 11:35
Jupiter 17:22 00:49 08:16
Saturn 13:05 18:37 00:09
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 May 2014  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
17 Apr 2016  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
22 May 2016  –  Mars at opposition
30 May 2016  –  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
EST

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