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 3°09' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 21 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 visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:06 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 36° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:44.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Mars at mag -1.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 23h07m20s 6°27'S Aquarius -12.1 30'33"2
Mars 23h07m20s 9°36'S Aquarius -1.0 13"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 109° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Jun 2035

The sky on 26 June 2035
Sunrise
05:05
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:39
Twilight begins
02:50

20-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

61%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 03:52 11:13 18:35
Venus 04:18 11:52 19:27
Moon 23:23 04:56 10:35
Mars 00:06 05:33 11:00
Jupiter 02:09 09:06 16:04
Saturn 07:31 14:51 22:11
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.

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.

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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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