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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 3°42' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Newark however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dawn.

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 -8.5, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h17m40s 19°23'N Gemini -8.5 29'58"8
Mars 07h17m40s 23°05'N Gemini 1.7 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jul 2030

The sky on 28 July 2030
Sunrise
05:46
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:08
Twilight begins
03:52

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:07 14:45 21:24
Venus 04:00 11:27 18:55
Moon 04:05 11:32 18:52
Mars 04:18 11:48 19:17
Jupiter 14:26 19:31 00:36
Saturn 01:35 08:49 16:03
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.

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.

Share

Newark

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

40.74°N
74.17°W
EST

Color scheme