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 8°22' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 16 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 17:56, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your north-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 00:28, 81° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:36, 12° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8, and Mars at mag -1.4, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 07h35m40s 17°18'N Gemini -12.8 33'18"8
Mars 07h35m40s 25°41'N Gemini -1.4 14"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 170° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Apr 2026

The sky on 25 April 2026
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
21:01
Twilight begins
04:36


Waxing Gibbous

75%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:26 11:40 17:54
Venus 07:30 14:33 21:37
Moon 14:04 20:48 03:24
Mars 05:09 11:22 17:35
Jupiter 10:45 17:53 01:02
Saturn 05:04 11:10 17:16
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

01 Dec 2071  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
06 Jan 2072  –  Mars at perigee
10 Jan 2072  –  Mars at opposition
18 Feb 2072  –  Mars ends retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share