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°22' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 13° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 19:57 (PDT), 13° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 49 minutes after the Sun at 21:07.

The Moon will be at mag -9.2 in the constellation Cetus, and Mars at mag 1.4 in the neighbouring constellation of Aries.

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 02h32m00s 9°43'N Cetus -9.2 32'11"1
Mars 02h32m00s 15°05'N Aries 1.4 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Sep 2025

The sky on 17 September 2025
Sunrise
06:34
Sunset
18:55
Twilight ends
20:19
Twilight begins
05:09


Waning Crescent

11%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:53 13:00 19:08
Venus 04:25 11:04 17:43
Moon 02:22 09:41 16:51
Mars 09:07 14:42 20:17
Jupiter 01:26 08:32 15:38
Saturn 19:09 01:04 06:59
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

03 Jun 1999  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
11 May 2001  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
13 Jun 2001  –  Mars at opposition
21 Jun 2001  –  Mars at perigee

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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