The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°15' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:46 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 32° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:03.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.7; and Mars will be at mag 1.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 13h05m20s 8°04'S Virgo -10.7 29'58"7
Mars 13h08m00s 5°54'S Virgo 1.7 4"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Nov 2032

The sky on 28 November 2032
Sunrise
06:53
Sunset
16:24
Twilight ends
18:02
Twilight begins
05:15

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

13%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:08 10:20 15:31
Venus 10:17 14:48 19:18
Moon 02:33 08:16 13:53
Mars 02:46 08:29 14:11
Jupiter 10:40 15:26 20:11
Saturn 18:17 01:44 09:12
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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05 Jul 2033  –  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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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