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°58' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 27 days old.

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

From San Diego however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 9° above the horizon at dawn.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3, and Mars at mag 1.2, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h50m30s 10°40'S Aquarius -10.3 33'04"8
Mars 22h50m30s 8°42'S Aquarius 1.2 4"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Apr 2024

The sky on 5 April 2024
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:11
Twilight ends
20:36
Twilight begins
05:04

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

6%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:45 13:22 19:59
Venus 05:54 11:54 17:53
Moon 04:44 10:16 15:57
Mars 05:00 10:40 16:19
Jupiter 08:06 14:53 21:39
Saturn 05:11 10:53 16:35
All times shown in PDT.

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

12 Jan 2023  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
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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San Diego

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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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