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 7°46' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 01:10, when they reach an altitude of 11° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 06:21, 53° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:21, 53° above your southern horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.8, and Mars at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 11h42m50s 3°37'S Virgo -11.8 32'17"6
Mars 11h42m50s 4°08'N Virgo 1.0 6"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 80° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Dec 2028

The sky on 9 December 2028
Sunrise
07:04
Sunset
16:23
Twilight ends
18:02
Twilight begins
05:25

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

36%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:05 12:30 16:55
Venus 04:59 10:00 15:01
Moon 23:38 05:54 11:59
Mars 00:02 06:20 12:38
Jupiter 02:21 07:58 13:36
Saturn 14:08 20:48 03:29
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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