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, Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°30' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Cambridge , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:28 (EDT) – 3 hours and 43 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 25° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:51.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.7; Venus will be at mag -4.4; and Mars will be at mag 1.5. The trio will lie in the constellation Libra.

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 trio will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

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

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 15h36m00s 14°28'S Libra -10.7 29'25"9
Venus 15h43m00s 16°18'S Libra -4.4 23"7
Mars 15h32m20s 18°34'S Libra 1.5 4"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 49° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jan 2035

The sky on 4 January 2035
Sunrise
07:11
Sunset
16:23
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:29

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

13%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:24 13:04 17:43
Venus 03:28 08:29 13:31
Moon 02:30 07:54 13:14
Mars 03:27 08:19 13:12
Jupiter 11:03 17:10 23:17
Saturn 17:49 01:10 08:30
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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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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