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 7°03' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 8 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:15 (EDT), 27° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 18:55, 28° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 22:39, when they sink below 9° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.0 in the constellation Aquarius, and Mars at mag -0.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Capricornus.

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 20h44m50s 13°16'S Aquarius -12.0 31'28"5
Mars 20h44m50s 20°20'S Capricornus -0.2 9"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 92° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 31 Oct 2033

The sky on 31 October 2033
Sunrise
07:20
Sunset
17:48
Twilight ends
19:22
Twilight begins
05:46

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

57%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:46 12:08 17:30
Venus 05:59 11:36 17:14
Moon 13:59 19:27 01:01
Mars 14:08 18:56 23:44
Jupiter 14:55 20:09 01:23
Saturn 22:19 05:42 13:06
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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11 Sep 2035  –  Mars at perigee
15 Sep 2035  –  Mars at opposition

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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41.14°N
73.26°W
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