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 20' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 5 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 17:21 (PDT), 41° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 21:57.

The Moon will be at mag -11.5, and Mars at mag 0.7, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 22h07m40s 13°05'S Aquarius -11.5 32'25"9
Mars 22h07m40s 12°45'S Aquarius 0.7 6"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 66° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jun 2025

The sky on 7 June 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:45
Twilight begins
03:54


Waxing Gibbous

92%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:16 13:34 20:51
Venus 03:17 09:46 16:15
Moon 17:09 22:21 03:28
Mars 10:50 17:34 00:17
Jupiter 06:31 13:42 20:53
Saturn 01:54 07:52 13:50
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

07 Jul 1969  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
10 Jul 1971  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
09 Aug 1971  –  Mars at opposition
11 Aug 1971  –  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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