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°33' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:22 (EDT) – 3 hours and 8 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 24° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:44.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.0, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Leo.

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 09h50m00s 7°52'N Leo -10.0 31'01"9
Mars 09h50m00s 14°26'N Leo 1.7 4"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Sep 2030

The sky on 24 September 2030
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
18:37
Twilight ends
20:12
Twilight begins
04:56

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:19 11:47 18:14
Venus 05:56 12:12 18:28
Moon 03:24 10:14 16:53
Mars 03:22 10:20 17:18
Jupiter 11:03 15:57 20:51
Saturn 21:40 04:59 12:19
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.

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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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