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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 1'36" to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 18 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:57, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:38, 55° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:05, 42° above your south-western horizon.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -12.3, and Mars at mag -1.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h49m10s 6°43'N Pisces -12.3 29'26"7
Mars 01h49m10s 6°41'N Pisces -1.9 19"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 135° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Sep 2020

The sky on 6 September 2020
Sunrise
06:22
Sunset
19:16
Twilight ends
20:52
Twilight begins
04:46

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

82%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:49 13:52 19:54
Venus 02:44 09:56 17:08
Moon 21:16 03:43 10:20
Mars 21:12 03:38 10:05
Jupiter 16:23 21:01 01:39
Saturn 16:52 21:36 02:20
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

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
13 Oct 2020  –  Mars at opposition

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

Color scheme