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 a mere 21.1 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 26 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:19 (EDT) – 3 hours and 3 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 23° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:35.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.2; and Mars will be at mag 1.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 07h18m40s 22°36'N Gemini -10.2 32'26"4
Mars 07h19m00s 22°57'N Gemini 1.6 4"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Aug 2028

The sky on 17 August 2028
Sunrise
06:22
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:40
Twilight begins
04:43

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

6%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:07 14:30 20:53
Venus 02:50 10:03 17:16
Moon 02:48 10:31 18:07
Mars 03:18 10:42 18:06
Jupiter 09:10 15:18 21:27
Saturn 23:16 06:01 12:46
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.

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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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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