The Moon, Mars and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 8°01' of each other. The Moon will be 10 days old.
From Fairfield, the trio will become visible around 20:18 (EDT), 24° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:07.
The Moon will be at mag -12.0 in Scorpius; Mars will be at mag -0.6 in Scorpius; and Saturn will be at mag 0.2 in Ophiuchus.
They 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.
At around the same time, the trio will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.
A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.
The positions of the trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 16h09m50s | -15°45' | Scorpius | -12.0 | 29'44"2 |
| Mars | 16h04m00s | -23°40' | Scorpius | -0.6 | 11"9 |
| Saturn | 16h32m30s | -20°17' | Ophiuchus | 0.2 | 17"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 103° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.
| The sky on 11 August 2016 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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66% 9 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 30 May 2016 | – Mars at perigee |
| 27 Jul 2018 | – Mars at opposition |
| 31 Jul 2018 | – Mars at perigee |
| 23 Aug 2020 | – Mars 2020: a great chance to see the red planet |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.