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°48' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:52 (PDT), 20° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 39 minutes after the Sun at 22:41.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h18m30s 17°41'N Gemini -10.3 32'16"9
Mars 07h18m30s 23°30'N Gemini 1.8 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Aug 2025

The sky on 13 August 2025
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:12
Twilight begins
04:37


Waning Gibbous

70%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:56 11:46 18:36
Venus 03:24 10:29 17:35
Moon 21:47 04:11 10:46
Mars 09:37 15:36 21:36
Jupiter 03:14 10:23 17:32
Saturn 21:32 03:30 09:27
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

10 Oct 1956  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
10 Oct 1958  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
08 Nov 1958  –  Mars at perigee
16 Nov 1958  –  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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