The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 5°46' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 13° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:30 (EST), 13° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 14 minutes after the Sun at 21:54.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5, and Mars at mag 1.6, both in the constellation Taurus.

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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Apr 2017

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.

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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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