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 4°46' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 18 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:29, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:10, 25° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:00, 21° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Mars at mag -2.2, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

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 20h50m40s 18°05'S Capricornus -12.4 29'26"3
Mars 20h50m40s 22°52'S Capricornus -2.2 20"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 148° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jun 2018

The sky on 30 June 2018
Sunrise
05:21
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:13

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

90%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:13 14:35 21:58
Venus 08:41 15:46 22:50
Moon 21:34 02:30 07:29
Mars 22:33 03:10 07:47
Jupiter 15:51 21:01 02:11
Saturn 20:04 00:43 05:22
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

26 Jun 2018  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
27 Jul 2018  –  Mars at opposition
31 Jul 2018  –  Mars at perigee
27 Aug 2018  –  Mars ends retrograde motion

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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