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°41' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 18 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:56, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:12, 48° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:59, 33° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6 in the constellation Pisces, and Mars at mag -2.3 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

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 00h50m40s 8°22'N Pisces -12.6 32'56"3
Mars 00h50m40s 0°18'S Cetus -2.3 21"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 142° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 May 2025

The sky on 12 May 2025
Sunrise
05:35
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:54
Twilight begins
03:42


Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:57 11:37 18:18
Venus 03:47 09:59 16:11
Moon 19:28 00:19 05:04
Mars 11:09 18:24 01:38
Jupiter 07:30 15:01 22:32
Saturn 03:34 09:28 15:23
All times shown in EDT.

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

26 Aug 1988  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
21 Sep 1988  –  Mars at perigee
27 Sep 1988  –  Mars at opposition
28 Oct 1988  –  Mars ends retrograde motion

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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