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 4°03' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 27 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 dawn sky, rising at 03:33 (PDT) – 3 hours and 0 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 26° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:51.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair 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.

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 08h57m10s 22°28'N Cancer -10.4 32'51"7
Mars 08h57m10s 18°24'N Cancer 1.7 4"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Sep 2025

The sky on 22 September 2025
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
18:48
Twilight ends
20:12
Twilight begins
05:13


Waxing Crescent

1%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:15 13:12 19:09
Venus 04:34 11:08 17:41
Moon 07:29 13:22 19:06
Mars 09:04 14:35 20:07
Jupiter 01:10 08:16 15:21
Saturn 18:48 00:43 06:37
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

19 Apr 1965  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
08 Mar 1967  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
15 Apr 1967  –  Mars at opposition
21 Apr 1967  –  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.

Share