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

Conjunction of the Moon and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

The Moon and Mars will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 5°59' to the north 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 17:16 (PDT), 43° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:42.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -11.8, and Mars at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h08m00s 6°53'S Aquarius -11.8 31'09"5
Mars 22h08m00s 12°52'S Aquarius 0.3 7"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 81° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Sep 2025

The sky on 10 September 2025
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:30
Twilight begins
05:04

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

81%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:18 12:41 19:03
Venus 04:11 10:58 17:45
Moon 20:18 02:55 09:42
Mars 09:13 14:52 20:32
Jupiter 01:48 08:55 16:02
Saturn 19:38 01:33 07:29
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

29 Jul 1954  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
10 Aug 1956  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
06 Sep 1956  –  Mars at perigee
10 Sep 1956  –  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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

Color scheme