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 1°20' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 27 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 15° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:59 (EST) – 2 hours and 24 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:33.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.5, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h07m00s 4°47'S Virgo -9.5 29'43"9
Mars 13h07m00s 6°07'S Virgo 1.8 3"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Nov 2034

The sky on 8 November 2034
Sunrise
06:23
Sunset
16:28
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
04:46

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:09 10:34 15:58
Venus 04:18 09:43 15:08
Moon 03:57 09:46 15:29
Mars 04:00 09:40 15:20
Jupiter 14:45 20:49 02:53
Saturn 21:44 05:02 12:20
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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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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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