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 46' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 8° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -9.0, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Libra.

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 14h23m40s 14°32'S Libra -9.0 32'26"5
Mars 14h23m40s 13°46'S Libra 1.7 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Libra 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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