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°19' 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 02:22 (PDT) – 3 hours and 19 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 31° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:01.

The Moon will be at mag -11.0; and Mars will be at mag 0.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

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 02h20m20s 18°24'N Aries -11.0 31'08"9
Mars 02h26m10s 13°15'N Aries 0.9 5"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 56° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Jul 2025

The sky on 15 July 2025
Sunrise
05:49
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:44
Twilight begins
04:07


Waning Gibbous

68%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:41 14:22 21:04
Venus 03:00 10:00 17:00
Moon 22:49 04:40 10:41
Mars 10:06 16:26 22:45
Jupiter 04:40 11:50 19:00
Saturn 23:28 05:27 11:25
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

01 Jan 1991  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
28 Nov 1992  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
03 Jan 1993  –  Mars at perigee
07 Jan 1993  –  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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