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 4°25' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 12° from it.

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The Moon will be at mag -8.1, and Mars at mag 1.3, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 01h38m50s 14°25'N Pisces -8.1 29'38"7
Mars 01h38m50s 9°59'N Pisces 1.3 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Apr 2030

The sky on 4 April 2030
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:20
Twilight ends
20:56
Twilight begins
04:53

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

2%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:03 14:01 20:59
Venus 04:42 10:04 15:26
Moon 07:02 14:06 21:18
Mars 07:01 13:40 20:19
Jupiter 22:43 03:40 08:36
Saturn 08:19 15:22 22:25
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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