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 4°54' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:31 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 46° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:22.

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 -11.2; and Mars will be at mag 0.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They 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.

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 04h12m50s 25°31'N Taurus -11.2 31'28"3
Mars 04h17m30s 20°44'N Taurus 0.9 5"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 61° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jul 2024

The sky on 30 July 2024
Sunrise
05:58
Sunset
19:47
Twilight ends
21:21
Twilight begins
04:24

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

21%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:03 14:26 20:50
Venus 07:13 13:56 20:39
Moon 01:20 08:43 16:12
Mars 01:32 08:32 15:31
Jupiter 02:01 09:03 16:06
Saturn 21:48 03:34 09:20
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.

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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

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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