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 3'36" to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 4 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 14° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 18:47 (EDT), 14° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 26 minutes after the Sun at 20:34.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.1, and Mars at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 16h43m10s 23°36'S Ophiuchus -11.1 32'35"6
Mars 16h43m10s 23°32'S Ophiuchus 1.0 5"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 54° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Oct 2029

The sky on 11 October 2029
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
18:08
Twilight ends
19:41
Twilight begins
05:16

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

25%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:39 11:42 17:45
Venus 11:00 15:29 19:57
Moon 11:37 16:14 20:51
Mars 11:34 16:04 20:34
Jupiter 08:07 13:27 18:47
Saturn 19:45 02:50 09:56
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.

Related news

05 May 2029  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
28 Mar 2031  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
04 May 2031  –  Mars at opposition
11 May 2031  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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