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°04' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 8 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 18:03 (EST), 72° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 18:23, 72° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:58, when they sink below 10° above your north-western horizon.

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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 05h08m50s 26°24'N Taurus -12.0 29'55"8
Mars 05h08m50s 25°20'N Taurus 0.4 8"2

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

The sky on 27 Feb 2023

The sky on 27 February 2023
Sunrise
06:21
Sunset
17:30
Twilight ends
19:04
Twilight begins
04:48

7-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

62%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:59 11:04 16:09
Venus 07:34 13:48 20:01
Moon 10:18 18:11 02:10
Mars 10:36 18:22 02:08
Jupiter 07:42 13:58 20:13
Saturn 06:06 11:20 16:35
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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06 Dec 2024  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
12 Jan 2025  –  Mars at perigee
15 Jan 2025  –  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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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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