The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 5°29' of each other. The Moon will be 5 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 19:27 (EDT), 43° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:34.

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 -11.0; and Mars will be at mag 1.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

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 pair 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 pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 03h03m00s 12°20'N Aries -11.0 30'33"6
Mars 02h55m50s 17°33'N Aries 1.3 5"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 56° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Mar 2019

The sky on 11 March 2019
Sunrise
07:02
Sunset
18:45
Twilight ends
20:19
Twilight begins
05:28

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

26%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:00 13:11 19:21
Venus 05:26 10:24 15:22
Moon 09:42 16:40 23:48
Mars 09:13 16:23 23:34
Jupiter 02:23 06:57 11:31
Saturn 04:09 08:48 13:26
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.

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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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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