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 2'35" to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 25 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 03:48 (PDT) – 2 hours and 37 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 21° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:51.

The Moon will be at mag -11.1, and Mars at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 21h26m20s 16°23'S Capricornus -11.1 29'31"3
Mars 21h26m20s 16°25'S Capricornus 0.9 5"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 61° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jul 2025

The sky on 16 July 2025
Sunrise
05:49
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:44
Twilight begins
04:08


Waning Gibbous

53%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:38 14:19 20:59
Venus 03:00 10:01 17:01
Moon 23:16 05:26 11:46
Mars 10:05 16:24 22:43
Jupiter 04:37 11:47 18:57
Saturn 23:24 05:23 11:21
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.

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12 Oct 2037  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
10 Nov 2037  –  Mars at perigee
19 Nov 2037  –  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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