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°48' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 10 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:44 (EDT), 27° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:27.

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 -12.2, and Mars at mag -1.1, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h24m40s 13°44'S Libra -12.2 29'38"9
Mars 15h24m40s 21°33'S Libra -1.1 14"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 119° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Jul 2016

The sky on 14 July 2016
Sunrise
05:30
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:26
Twilight begins
03:28

10-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

78%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:10 13:35 21:00
Venus 06:21 13:42 21:03
Moon 15:37 20:57 02:13
Mars 16:01 20:44 01:27
Jupiter 10:19 16:41 23:03
Saturn 17:07 21:55 02:43
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

29 Jun 2016  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
26 Jun 2018  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
27 Jul 2018  –  Mars at opposition
31 Jul 2018  –  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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