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

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 0° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -9.0, and Mars at mag 1.5, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h14m20s 22°50'S Libra -9.0 29'23"3
Mars 15h14m20s 18°20'S Libra 1.5 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 Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Oct 2025

The sky on 23 October 2025
Sunrise
07:11
Sunset
17:59
Twilight ends
19:32
Twilight begins
05:38


Waxing Crescent

5%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:18 14:03 18:48
Venus 05:37 11:29 17:21
Moon 09:30 14:07 18:37
Mars 09:02 13:58 18:54
Jupiter 23:05 06:29 13:52
Saturn 16:41 22:30 04:20
All times shown in EDT.

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.

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19 Feb 2027  –  Mars at opposition
19 Feb 2027  –  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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