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 3°36' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 21 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 be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:25, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:55, 69° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:58, 69° above your southern 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 -12.0, and Mars at mag -0.4, 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 04h51m50s 25°07'N Taurus -12.0 29'49"3
Mars 04h51m50s 21°30'N Taurus -0.4 10"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 99° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Sep 2022

The sky on 16 September 2022
Sunrise
06:22
Sunset
18:52
Twilight ends
20:28
Twilight begins
04:46

20-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

53%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:38 13:18 18:58
Venus 05:33 12:04 18:36
Moon 21:36 05:19 13:12
Mars 22:26 05:54 13:21
Jupiter 19:19 01:23 07:28
Saturn 17:27 22:29 03:30
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.

Share

Cambridge

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

Color scheme