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 1°23' to the north of Mars. The Moon will be 5 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 21:06 (EDT), 38° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:40.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.4, and Mars at mag 1.3, both in the constellation Leo.

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 09h35m00s 17°17'N Leo -11.4 30'55"2
Mars 09h35m00s 15°53'N Leo 1.3 5"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 69° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Jun 2025

The sky on 1 June 2025
Sunrise
05:07
Sunset
20:14
Twilight ends
22:24
Twilight begins
02:58

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

37%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:16 12:53 20:30
Venus 03:08 09:39 16:11
Moon 10:45 18:01 01:03
Mars 10:34 17:37 00:40
Jupiter 06:17 13:52 21:28
Saturn 02:11 08:07 14:03
All times shown in EDT.

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

23 Feb 2025  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
10 Jan 2027  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
19 Feb 2027  –  Mars at opposition
19 Feb 2027  –  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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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