Close approach of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 23.4 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:52 (PDT), 15° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 38 minutes after the Sun at 19:14.

Venus will be at mag -3.9; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 23h04m20s 7°28'S Aquarius -3.9 10"7
Jupiter 23h03m40s 7°07'S Aquarius -2.1 32"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Sep 2025

The sky on 12 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:02
Twilight ends
20:27
Twilight begins
05:05


Waning Gibbous

64%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:28 12:47 19:05
Venus 04:15 11:00 17:44
Moon 21:29 04:44 12:09
Mars 09:11 14:49 20:28
Jupiter 01:42 08:49 15:55
Saturn 19:30 01:25 07:20
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.

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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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