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 3°50' to the south of Mars. The Moon will be 20 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 visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:23, when they reach an altitude of 8° above your north-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:48, 79° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:48, 61° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.3 in the constellation Orion, and Mars at mag -0.8 in the neighbouring constellation of 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 06h08m40s 20°02'N Orion -12.3 30'50"8
Mars 06h08m40s 23°53'N Gemini -0.8 13"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 119° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Nov 2025

The sky on 4 November 2025
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
16:55
Twilight ends
18:21
Twilight begins
04:46

14-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:10 13:04 17:57
Venus 04:59 10:37 16:15
Moon 16:16 23:14 06:23
Mars 07:40 12:45 17:49
Jupiter 21:38 04:42 11:46
Saturn 14:48 20:40 02:31
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.

Related news

25 Nov 1973  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
06 Nov 1975  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
08 Dec 1975  –  Mars at perigee
15 Dec 1975  –  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
PST

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