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 6°24' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 2 days old.

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 17:44 (EDT), 14° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 11 minutes after the Sun at 19:12.

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 -9.6 in the constellation Pisces, and Mars at mag 1.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

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 22h54m10s 1°32'S Pisces -9.6 30'40"4
Mars 22h54m10s 7°57'S Aquarius 1.2 4"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Feb 2030

The sky on 4 February 2030
Sunrise
06:52
Sunset
17:01
Twilight ends
18:37
Twilight begins
05:16

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

8%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:52 10:29 15:06
Venus 04:25 09:25 14:25
Moon 07:31 13:27 19:34
Mars 08:04 13:37 19:11
Jupiter 01:23 06:18 11:12
Saturn 10:47 17:48 00:48
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.

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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
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