Conjunction of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 45' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 11 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:57 (PDT), 48° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:02, 60° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:33, when they sink below 8° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6, and Mars at mag -0.7, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 11h36m50s 3°56'N Leo -12.6 32'33"7
Mars 11h36m50s 4°42'N Leo -0.7 12"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 134° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Jun 2025

The sky on 8 June 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
03:53


Waxing Gibbous

95%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:21 13:39 20:56
Venus 03:16 09:46 16:16
Moon 18:08 23:07 04:01
Mars 10:49 17:32 00:15
Jupiter 06:28 13:39 20:50
Saturn 01:50 07:48 13:46
All times shown in PDT.

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

26 Mar 1950  –  Mars at perigee
03 May 1950  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
25 Mar 1952  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
30 Apr 1952  –  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