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 3°16' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 4 days old.

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

From Ashburn however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 10° above the horizon at dusk.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.0, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Leo.

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 10h33m20s 13°26'N Leo -10.0 29'25"2
Mars 10h33m20s 10°10'N Leo 1.8 4"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Jul 2023

The sky on 21 July 2023
Sunrise
05:58
Sunset
20:31
Twilight ends
22:22
Twilight begins
04:06

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

13%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:40 14:38 21:37
Venus 08:37 15:09 21:42
Moon 09:25 16:15 22:54
Mars 09:11 15:47 22:23
Jupiter 01:03 07:54 14:45
Saturn 22:21 03:48 09:15
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.

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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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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