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 48' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 4 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 20:49 (PST), 29° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 21 minutes after the Sun at 23:21.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 08h29m30s 21°15'N Cancer -10.7 31'01"9
Mars 08h29m30s 20°26'N Cancer 1.7 4"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Nov 2025

The sky on 19 November 2025
Sunrise
06:26
Sunset
16:45
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
04:59


Waning Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:34 11:42 16:49
Venus 05:30 10:50 16:10
Moon 06:07 11:09 16:05
Mars 07:34 12:31 17:29
Jupiter 20:39 03:43 10:47
Saturn 13:48 19:39 01:30
All times shown in PST.

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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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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