Close approach of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 6°15' of each other. The Moon will be 18 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:21, when they reach an altitude of 8° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:32, 74° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:37, 33° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7 in Cancer; and Mars will be at mag -0.8 in Leo.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 09h17m40s 13°13'N Cancer -12.7 33'07"5
Mars 09h27m50s 19°00'N Leo -0.8 12"8

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 6 Jul 2025

The sky on 6 July 2025
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
04:00


Waxing Gibbous

89%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:42 21:33
Venus 03:00 09:54 16:48
Moon 16:58 21:49 02:37
Mars 10:16 16:41 23:07
Jupiter 05:06 12:17 19:27
Saturn 00:03 06:02 12:01
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

20 Dec 2009  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
27 Jan 2010  –  Mars at perigee
29 Jan 2010  –  Mars at opposition
10 Mar 2010  –  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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