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 46' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 11 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:46 (PDT), 37° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:46, 83° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:15, when they sink below 8° above your north-western horizon.

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 -12.6, and Mars at mag -0.8, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h20m10s 27°03'N Gemini -12.6 31'09"0
Mars 07h20m10s 26°16'N Gemini -0.8 12"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 146° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Feb 2025

The sky on 9 February 2025
Sunrise
06:34
Sunset
17:28
Twilight ends
18:51
Twilight begins
05:11

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

94%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:45 12:05 17:24
Venus 08:20 14:34 20:48
Moon 14:38 22:11 05:38
Mars 14:29 21:46 05:03
Jupiter 12:02 19:04 02:06
Saturn 08:00 13:46 19:32
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

15 Jan 2025  –  Mars at opposition
23 Feb 2025  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
10 Jan 2027  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
19 Feb 2027  –  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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San Diego

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Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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