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 9°23' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 18 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:10, when they reach an altitude of 8° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:17, 63° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:52, 25° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6 in the constellation Sextans, and Mars at mag -0.8 in the neighbouring constellation of Leo.

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 10h17m30s 5°39'N Sextans -12.6 30'57"4
Mars 10h17m30s 15°02'N Leo -0.8 12"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 144° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2025

The sky on 10 May 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
19:59
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:46


Waxing Gibbous

97%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:57 11:32 18:08
Venus 03:50 10:01 16:12
Moon 18:24 23:36 04:39
Mars 11:12 18:28 01:43
Jupiter 07:36 15:07 22:38
Saturn 03:41 09:36 15:30
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

02 Jan 1995  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
11 Feb 1995  –  Mars at perigee
11 Feb 1995  –  Mars at opposition
24 Mar 1995  –  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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