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 2°45' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 22 days old.

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

From Seattle , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:47 (PDT) – 2 hours and 43 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 17° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:50.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.7, and Mars at mag 0.2, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair 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.

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 22h15m00s 15°41'S Aquarius -11.7 29'53"2
Mars 22h15m00s 12°56'S Aquarius 0.2 8"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 84° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 14 May 2020

The sky on 14 May 2020
Sunrise
05:30
Sunset
20:39
Twilight ends
23:03
Twilight begins
03:07

21-day old moon
Waning Crescent

40%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:57 13:51 21:44
Venus 06:36 14:58 23:20
Moon 02:44 07:29 12:21
Mars 02:47 07:52 12:57
Jupiter 01:09 05:34 09:59
Saturn 01:23 05:54 10:24
All times shown in PDT.

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.

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Seattle

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47.61°N
122.33°W
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