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°48' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 7 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 become visible at around 19:56 (PDT), 59° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:59.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4, and Mars at mag 1.2, 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 06h07m10s 22°23'N Gemini -11.4 30'21"4
Mars 06h07m10s 25°11'N Gemini 1.2 5"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 70° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Aug 2025

The sky on 15 August 2025
Sunrise
06:11
Sunset
19:38
Twilight ends
21:09
Twilight begins
04:39


Waning Gibbous

51%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:51 11:42 18:33
Venus 03:26 10:31 17:36
Moon 22:51 05:54 13:06
Mars 09:35 15:33 21:31
Jupiter 03:08 10:17 17:25
Saturn 21:24 03:22 09:19
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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28 Dec 2039  –  Mars at perigee
02 Jan 2040  –  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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