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 18' to the south 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 be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 14° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 19:00 (PDT), 14° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 1 minute after the Sun at 20:23.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4, and Mars at mag 1.3, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h45m40s 20°59'S Libra -10.4 30'09"0
Mars 15h45m40s 20°40'S Libra 1.3 4"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 19 May 2025

The sky on 19 May 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
19:49
Twilight ends
21:28
Twilight begins
04:06


Waning Crescent

49%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:13 11:59 18:46
Venus 03:39 09:53 16:07
Moon 01:14 06:23 11:39
Mars 11:15 18:09 01:03
Jupiter 07:28 14:38 21:49
Saturn 03:05 09:02 14:59
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

09 Apr 2059  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
22 Feb 2061  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
02 Apr 2061  –  Mars at opposition
07 Apr 2061  –  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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