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 8°32' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 22 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:01, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:09, 57° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:16, 53° above your south-western horizon.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Mars at mag 0.5, 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 12h26m20s 8°35'S Virgo -12.1 32'16"7
Mars 12h26m20s 0°03'S Virgo 0.5 7"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 97° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jan 2029

The sky on 6 January 2029
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
16:56
Twilight ends
18:24
Twilight begins
05:21

21-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

50%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 13:03 18:15
Venus 05:33 10:33 15:32
Moon 22:42 04:43 10:37
Mars 23:06 05:09 11:11
Jupiter 00:37 06:18 11:58
Saturn 12:21 18:51 01:21
All times shown in PST.

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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32.72°N
117.16°W
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