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°54' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 21 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:00, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 06:25, 69° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:33, 69° above your southern horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.0, and Mars at mag 0.2, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h50m00s 26°05'N Gemini -12.0 30'45"6
Mars 07h50m00s 22°11'N Gemini 0.2 8"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 95° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Oct 2024

The sky on 23 October 2024
Sunrise
07:04
Sunset
17:49
Twilight ends
19:23
Twilight begins
05:30

21-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

50%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:25 13:22 18:19
Venus 10:18 14:52 19:25
Moon 21:47 06:01 14:07
Mars 22:53 06:24 13:55
Jupiter 20:23 03:55 11:26
Saturn 16:01 21:32 03:03
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.

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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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