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 5'18" to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 1° above the horizon at dusk.

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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:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 08h14m40s 21°08'N Cancer -8.9 32'46"6
Mars 08h14m40s 21°02'N Cancer 1.8 3"6

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.

The sky on 4 Jul 2019

The sky on 4 July 2019
Sunrise
05:23
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:35
Twilight begins
03:16

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

5%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:18 14:25 21:33
Venus 04:35 12:07 19:40
Moon 07:15 14:51 22:19
Mars 06:57 14:18 21:40
Jupiter 18:22 23:02 03:42
Saturn 20:39 01:20 06:01
All times shown in EDT.

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

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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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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