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

Close approach of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 32.1 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Mars, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 15 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible between 16:55 and 06:29. They will become accessible at around 16:55, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your north-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 23:42, 73° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 06:29 when they sink below 7° above your north-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Mars will be at mag -1.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 04h56m50s 25°29'N Taurus -12.6 29'50"3
Mars 04h57m10s 24°57'N Taurus -1.9 17"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 177° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Dec 2022

The sky on 7 December 2022
Sunrise
07:02
Sunset
16:23
Twilight ends
18:02
Twilight begins
05:23

14-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:26 12:50 17:14
Venus 08:00 12:32 17:04
Moon 15:57 23:42 07:35
Mars 16:03 23:43 07:23
Jupiter 12:47 18:43 00:40
Saturn 11:12 16:17 21:22
All times shown in EST.

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.

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08 Dec 2022  –  Mars at opposition
12 Jan 2023  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
06 Dec 2024  –  Mars enters 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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41.14°N
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