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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 5°12' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 24 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 dawn sky, rising at 02:49 (EST) – 3 hours and 33 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 21° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:43.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -11.3, and Mars at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h14m50s 18°24'S Sagittarius -11.3 29'39"7
Mars 18h15m00s 23°36'S Sagittarius 1.0 5"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 69° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Mar 2035

The sky on 3 March 2035
Sunrise
06:22
Sunset
17:44
Twilight ends
19:16
Twilight begins
04:50

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

27%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:30 10:33 15:35
Venus 04:35 09:28 14:21
Moon 01:58 06:56 11:53
Mars 02:48 07:22 11:56
Jupiter 07:46 14:08 20:29
Saturn 13:48 21:09 04:30
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.

Related news

01 Aug 2033  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
15 Aug 2035  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
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.

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

Color scheme