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 21' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 26 days old.

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

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:15 (PDT) – 2 hours and 55 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 25° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:28.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.2, and Mars at mag 1.6, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair 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.

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 07h19m00s 22°35'N Gemini -10.2 32'26"6
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
06:10
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
20:59
Twilight begins
04:41

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

6%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 14:09 20:27
Venus 02:44 09:42 16:40
Moon 02:53 10:16 17:34
Mars 03:15 10:21 17:27
Jupiter 08:49 14:57 21:04
Saturn 23:03 05:40 12:16
All times shown in PDT.

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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San Diego

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Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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