The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 0°05' to the north 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 8° above the horizon. They will become visible around 20:43 (EDT) as the dusk sky fades, 8° above your western horizon. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 15 minutes after the Sun at 21:36.

The Moon will be at mag -8.9, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

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 DE405 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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