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°33' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 8° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.6, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Libra.

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 14h52m00s 21°42'S Libra -8.6 29'29"2
Mars 14h52m00s 16°08'S Libra 1.7 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Jul 2025

The sky on 1 July 2025
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waxing Crescent

40%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:46 14:43 21:41
Venus 03:01 09:51 16:41
Moon 12:09 18:15 00:12
Mars 10:21 16:50 23:19
Jupiter 05:21 12:31 19:42
Saturn 00:22 06:21 12:20
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

27 Oct 1988  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
20 Oct 1990  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
19 Nov 1990  –  Mars at perigee
27 Nov 1990  –  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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