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 59' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 9 days old.

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

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:10 (PDT), 41° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 18:18, 44° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 22:56, when they sink below 9° above your south-western horizon.

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 -11.9, and Mars at mag -0.3, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 22h10m20s 14°03'S Aquarius -11.9 29'38"8
Mars 22h10m20s 13°04'S Aquarius -0.3 10"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 96° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Nov 2018

The sky on 15 November 2018
Sunrise
06:16
Sunset
16:47
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
04:51

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

59%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:59 12:54 17:49
Venus 04:06 09:39 15:13
Moon 12:43 18:14 23:48
Mars 12:49 18:17 23:45
Jupiter 06:57 12:06 17:16
Saturn 09:34 14:34 19:35
All times shown in PST.

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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23 Aug 2020  –  Mars 2020: a great chance to see the red planet
09 Sep 2020  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
06 Oct 2020  –  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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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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