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 5°53' of each other. The Moon will be 9 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 18:27 (PST), 81° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:45.

The Moon will be at mag -12.0; and Mars will be at mag 0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They 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.

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 05h43m50s 19°57'N Taurus -12.0 30'37"0
Mars 05h45m00s 25°50'N Taurus 0.5 7"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 96° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Nov 2025

The sky on 4 November 2025
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
16:55
Twilight ends
18:21
Twilight begins
04:46


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:10 13:04 17:57
Venus 04:59 10:37 16:15
Moon 16:16 23:14 06:23
Mars 07:40 12:45 17:49
Jupiter 21:38 04:42 11:46
Saturn 14:48 20:40 02:31
All times shown in PST.

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

20 Jan 1976  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
12 Dec 1977  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
18 Jan 1978  –  Mars at perigee
21 Jan 1978  –  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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