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 2°52' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:41 (PDT) – 2 hours and 33 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 21° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:39.

The Moon will be at mag -11.2; and Mars will be at mag 0.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

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 22h05m10s 10°14'S Aquarius -11.2 31'39"7
Mars 22h10m20s 12°49'S Aquarius 0.9 5"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 60° from the Sun, which is in Aries 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

41%

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.

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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