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 44' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 24 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:59 (EDT) – 2 hours and 58 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:20.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.3, and Mars at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 19h31m30s 23°13'S Sagittarius -11.3 30'24"4
Mars 19h31m30s 22°29'S Sagittarius 0.9 5"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 66° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Mar 2020

The sky on 18 March 2020
Sunrise
06:57
Sunset
19:03
Twilight ends
20:35
Twilight begins
05:24

24-day old moon
Waning Crescent

25%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:57 11:19 16:42
Venus 08:37 15:49 23:00
Moon 04:06 08:48 13:31
Mars 04:00 08:39 13:18
Jupiter 04:00 08:43 13:25
Saturn 04:25 09:13 14:01
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.

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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