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 1°55' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 6 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 19:36 (EST), 56° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:57.

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 -11.3, and Mars at mag 1.2, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h27m30s 21°18'N Taurus -11.3 29'34"1
Mars 04h27m30s 23°14'N Taurus 1.2 5"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 69° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Mar 2021

The sky on 19 March 2021
Sunrise
06:47
Sunset
18:55
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:12

6-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

36%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:04 11:24 16:44
Venus 06:52 12:46 18:41
Moon 09:58 17:28 01:07
Mars 09:45 17:21 00:57
Jupiter 05:21 10:27 15:32
Saturn 04:52 09:45 14:39
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

13 Nov 2020  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
30 Oct 2022  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
30 Nov 2022  –  Mars at perigee
08 Dec 2022  –  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.

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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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