Close approach of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 1°06' of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Mars, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 19:50 (PDT), 57° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:43.

The Moon will be at mag -11.5; and Mars will be at mag 1.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 05h04m40s 23°18'N Taurus -11.5 31'57"4
Mars 05h04m40s 24°25'N Taurus 1.2 5"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 68° from the Sun, which is in Pisces 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

25 Nov 1973  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
06 Nov 1975  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
08 Dec 1975  –  Mars at perigee
15 Dec 1975  –  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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