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 3°24' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 26 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 dawn sky, rising at 04:11 (PDT) – 2 hours and 46 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 19° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:14.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4 in the constellation Scorpius, and Mars at mag 1.5 in the neighbouring constellation of Ophiuchus.

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 16h29m10s 25°07'S Scorpius -10.4 32'53"8
Mars 16h29m10s 21°42'S Ophiuchus 1.5 4"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Aug 2025

The sky on 27 August 2025
Sunrise
06:19
Sunset
19:24
Twilight ends
20:52
Twilight begins
04:51


Waxing Crescent

22%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:06 11:54 18:42
Venus 03:46 10:44 17:43
Moon 10:37 16:07 21:29
Mars 09:24 15:14 21:04
Jupiter 02:32 09:40 16:47
Saturn 20:35 02:32 08:29
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 Sep 2003  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
01 Oct 2005  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
29 Oct 2005  –  Mars at perigee
06 Nov 2005  –  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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