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 5°19' of each other. The Moon will be 14 days old.

From Seattle , the pair will be visible between 18:02 and 06:44. They will become accessible at around 18:02, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:23, 58° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 06:44 when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

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 -12.8; and Mars will be at mag -1.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 10h05m00s 10°51'N Leo -12.8 32'54"6
Mars 10h14m30s 15°39'N Leo -1.2 13"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 177° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Feb 2027

The sky on 20 February 2027
Sunrise
07:04
Sunset
17:39
Twilight ends
19:22
Twilight begins
05:21

14-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:35 11:59 17:22
Venus 05:05 09:31 13:57
Moon 17:43 00:36 07:16
Mars 17:08 00:23 07:38
Jupiter 16:22 23:37 06:53
Saturn 08:39 14:53 21:08
All times shown in PST.

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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25 Mar 2029  –  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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