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 5°21' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From San Diego however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dusk.

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 -8.8, and Mars at mag 1.7, 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:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 05h33m40s 18°47'N Taurus -8.8 33'20"4
Mars 05h33m40s 24°08'N Taurus 1.7 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 26 May 2017

The sky on 26 May 2017
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
19:48
Twilight ends
21:26
Twilight begins
04:03

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

4%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:36 11:11 17:47
Venus 03:28 09:46 16:05
Moon 06:43 13:49 20:59
Mars 06:53 14:03 21:13
Jupiter 15:27 21:20 03:12
Saturn 21:10 02:13 07:16
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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
26 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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San Diego

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Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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