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 1°39' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 8 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 19:29 (PDT), 81° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 19:35, 81° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 01:52, when they sink below 10° above your north-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Mars at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h16m00s 27°36'N Gemini -12.1 31'59"1
Mars 06h16m00s 25°57'N Gemini 0.5 7"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 98° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Sep 2025

The sky on 11 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:03
Twilight ends
20:28
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Gibbous

77%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 12:44 19:04
Venus 04:13 10:59 17:45
Moon 20:51 03:48 10:55
Mars 09:12 14:51 20:30
Jupiter 01:45 08:52 15:58
Saturn 19:34 01:29 07:24
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

30 Jan 2008  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
20 Dec 2009  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
27 Jan 2010  –  Mars at perigee
29 Jan 2010  –  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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