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 1°33' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 2 days old.

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

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dusk.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.4, and Mars at mag 1.3, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h13m20s 25°58'S Sagittarius -9.4 30'07"9
Mars 18h13m20s 24°25'S Sagittarius 1.3 4"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Nov 2027

The sky on 30 November 2027
Sunrise
06:54
Sunset
16:24
Twilight ends
18:02
Twilight begins
05:16

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

7%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:26 11:13 16:01
Venus 09:13 13:42 18:10
Moon 09:29 13:53 18:21
Mars 09:00 13:30 18:00
Jupiter 00:43 06:57 13:12
Saturn 14:13 20:36 02:59
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.

Related news

01 Apr 2027  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
14 Feb 2029  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
25 Mar 2029  –  Mars at opposition
29 Mar 2029  –  Mars at perigee

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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