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°09' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 21 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:59 (PST) and reaching an altitude of 50° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:27.

The Moon will be at mag -12.2 in the constellation Pisces, and Mars at mag -0.9 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

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 23h51m10s 0°10'N Pisces -12.2 32'22"2
Mars 23h51m10s 4°58'S Aquarius -0.9 13"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 105° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Nov 2025

The sky on 9 November 2025
Sunrise
06:16
Sunset
16:51
Twilight ends
18:17
Twilight begins
04:50


Waning Gibbous

74%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:57 12:51 17:45
Venus 05:09 10:41 16:13
Moon 19:52 03:30 11:03
Mars 07:38 12:40 17:42
Jupiter 21:19 04:23 11:27
Saturn 14:28 20:19 02:11
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

12 Aug 1986  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
26 Aug 1988  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
21 Sep 1988  –  Mars at perigee
27 Sep 1988  –  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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