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°27' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 17 days old.

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

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 19:36, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your north-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:01, 81° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:56, 38° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Mars at mag -1.5, 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 05h34m40s 26°48'N Taurus -12.5 29'46"9
Mars 05h34m40s 24°20'N Taurus -1.5 16"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 144° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Nov 2022

The sky on 11 November 2022
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
16:49
Twilight ends
18:14
Twilight begins
04:47

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

87%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:24 11:38 16:52
Venus 06:38 11:52 17:05
Moon 18:23 01:52 09:24
Mars 18:50 02:01 09:11
Jupiter 14:23 20:21 02:19
Saturn 12:30 17:49 23:08
All times shown in PST.

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

30 Oct 2022  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
30 Nov 2022  –  Mars at perigee
07 Dec 2022  –  Mars at opposition
12 Jan 2023  –  Mars ends retrograde motion

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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32.72°N
117.16°W
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