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 3°20' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:49 (PDT) – 2 hours and 56 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 23° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:01.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.3; and Mars will be at mag 1.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

They 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.

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 15h23m50s 14°42'S Libra -10.3 31'52"3
Mars 15h19m30s 17°52'S Libra 1.6 4"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Dec 2019

The sky on 22 December 2019
Sunrise
06:45
Sunset
16:46
Twilight ends
18:15
Twilight begins
05:16

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

7%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:01 11:00 15:58
Venus 09:01 14:06 19:11
Moon 03:01 08:43 14:19
Mars 03:48 09:03 14:18
Jupiter 07:03 12:02 17:01
Saturn 08:07 13:10 18:14
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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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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