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 and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 4°01' of each other. The Moon will be 15 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible between 19:55 and 05:23. They will become accessible at around 19:55, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:39, 39° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:23 when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Mars will be at mag -2.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

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

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

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 23h33m50s 4°31'S Aquarius -12.6 30'55"6
Mars 23h38m50s 8°20'S Aquarius -2.8 24"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 177° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Sep 2035

The sky on 17 September 2035
Sunrise
06:22
Sunset
18:50
Twilight ends
20:26
Twilight begins
04:46

15-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:53 13:28 19:03
Venus 07:17 13:17 19:18
Moon 18:33 00:20 06:14
Mars 19:06 00:39 06:11
Jupiter 21:05 04:12 11:18
Saturn 02:57 10:06 17:15
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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12 Oct 2037  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
11 Nov 2037  –  Mars at perigee

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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