The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 32' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 11 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 evening sky, becoming accessible around 16:43 (EST), 31° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:15, 72° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:03, when they sink below 7° above your north-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Mars at mag -1.1, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair 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.

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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 145° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jan 2023

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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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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