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 6°49' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:24 (PDT) – 2 hours and 8 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:55.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6 in the constellation Aquarius, and Mars at mag 1.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Capricornus.

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 21h58m20s 6°54'S Aquarius -10.6 29'25"8
Mars 21h58m20s 13°44'S Capricornus 1.1 5"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Sep 2025

The sky on 8 September 2025
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:07
Twilight ends
20:33
Twilight begins
05:02


Waning Gibbous

96%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:07 12:34 19:01
Venus 04:08 10:56 17:45
Moon 19:19 01:16 07:22
Mars 09:14 14:55 20:37
Jupiter 01:55 09:01 16:08
Saturn 19:46 01:42 07:37
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

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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