The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°11' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.
From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:49 (EST) – 3 hours and 17 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 19° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:19.
The Moon will be at mag -10.8; and Mars will be at mag 1.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Ophiuchus.
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 | 16h42m00s | 19°52'S | Ophiuchus | -10.8 | 31'16"6 |
| Mars | 16h40m00s | 22°00'S | Ophiuchus | 1.4 | 4"5 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.
The sky on 20 Jan 2020
| The sky on 20 January 2020 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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12% 25 days old |
All times shown in EST.
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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
| 27 Aug 2018 | – Mars ends retrograde motion |
| 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.