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 5°11' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 2 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 become visible at around 18:19 (PDT), 28° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 2 minutes after the Sun at 20:43.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5 in the constellation Pisces, and Mars at mag 1.3 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

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 00h27m40s 7°47'N Pisces -10.5 32'54"1
Mars 00h27m40s 2°35'N Cetus 1.3 4"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Sep 2025

The sky on 9 September 2025
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:31
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Gibbous

90%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:13 12:38 19:02
Venus 04:10 10:57 17:45
Moon 19:48 02:05 08:32
Mars 09:13 14:54 20:34
Jupiter 01:52 08:58 16:05
Saturn 19:42 01:37 07:33
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

09 Jun 1952  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
23 May 1954  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
24 Jun 1954  –  Mars at opposition
02 Jul 1954  –  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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