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 5°55' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 14 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible between 18:35 and 06:57. They will become accessible at around 18:35, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:46, 65° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 06:57 when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.8, and Mars at mag -1.2, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair 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.

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 10h14m10s 9°45'N Leo -12.8 32'52"1
Mars 10h14m10s 15°41'N Leo -1.2 13"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 178° 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
07:16
Sunset
18:12
Twilight ends
19:43
Twilight begins
05:45

14-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:50 12:22 17:55
Venus 05:04 09:54 14:43
Moon 16:55 00:03 06:57
Mars 17:49 00:46 07:44
Jupiter 17:07 00:04 07:02
Saturn 09:05 15:16 21:28
All times shown in EST.

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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14 Feb 2029  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
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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Columbus

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Longitude:
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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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