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 8°44' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:00 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 46° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:15.

The Moon will be at mag -11.8, and Mars at mag -0.2, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h13m20s 7°12'N Pisces -11.8 31'18"3
Mars 00h13m20s 1°31'S Pisces -0.2 9"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 86° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Aug 2025

The sky on 28 August 2025
Sunrise
06:20
Sunset
19:22
Twilight ends
20:50
Twilight begins
04:52


Waxing Crescent

28%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:11 11:57 18:44
Venus 03:47 10:45 17:43
Moon 11:35 16:50 21:57
Mars 09:23 15:12 21:01
Jupiter 02:29 09:36 16:44
Saturn 20:31 02:28 08:24
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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