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 4°59' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 11 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:13 (PDT), 38° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:07, 46° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:01, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Mars at mag -1.2, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair 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.

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 13h32m30s 4°40'S Virgo -12.4 29'36"8
Mars 13h32m30s 9°40'S Virgo -1.2 14"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 138° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jun 2025

The sky on 30 June 2025
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:56


Waxing Crescent

36%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:44 14:43 21:42
Venus 03:01 09:51 16:40
Moon 11:11 17:34 23:48
Mars 10:22 16:52 23:22
Jupiter 05:24 12:34 19:45
Saturn 00:26 06:25 12:24
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 May 1999  –  Mars at perigee
03 Jun 1999  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
11 May 2001  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
13 Jun 2001  –  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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