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°27' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 16° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:22 (PDT) – 2 hours and 19 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:56.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Libra.

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 14h38m30s 20°21'S Libra -9.5 29'25"2
Mars 14h38m30s 14°53'S Libra 1.7 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Sep 2025

The sky on 27 September 2025
Sunrise
06:41
Sunset
18:41
Twilight ends
20:04
Twilight begins
05:17


Waxing Crescent

38%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:36 13:22 19:09
Venus 04:44 11:12 17:39
Moon 12:22 17:06 21:46
Mars 09:00 14:28 19:56
Jupiter 00:53 07:59 15:04
Saturn 18:28 00:22 06:16
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 Sep 1971  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
19 Sep 1973  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
16 Oct 1973  –  Mars at perigee
24 Oct 1973  –  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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