The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 52.0 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Mars, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 17 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 19:49, when they reach an altitude of 8° above your north-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:27, 69° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:45, 33° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Mars will be at mag -0.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 141° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Dec 2024

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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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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